Donald Trump has now said more than 5,000 false claims as president

WASHINGTON—It took Donald Trump 343 days to utter 1,000 false claims as president.

Then his dishonesty accelerated. It took him just 197 days to get to 2,000 false claims.

Then it got worse again: it took 93 days to get to 3,000. And then it got worse once more: it took him 75 days to hit 4,000.

There’s been a slight improvement since Christmas, found Star editor Ed Tubb, the number-cruncher for these fact-checks. It took him 125 days to get to 5,000 false claims — a mere, for him, 8 per day over that period.

But 8 per day is a lot. It’s all a lot. Through Sunday, Trump has made an astonishing 5,276 false claims in office, an overall average of 6.1 per day.

This week’s update is actually an update for six weeks. (I took some time off work and fell hopelessly behind). Three of those weeks were among the worst 25 of Trump’s 125 so far.

He made 86 false claims the week ending April 28 (14th-worst), 72 false claims the week ending May 19 (22nd-worst), and 69 false claims the week ending May 26 (23rd-worst).

I’ve also added some repeated false claims I missed in weeks prior — Trump’s claim that Puerto Rico has received $91 billion in hurricane assistance, which is not close to true, and Trump’s claim that China has lost $15 trillion, $20 trillion, $24 trillion or $25 trillion during his presidency. (He has used different numbers for no apparent reason.)

On a personal note: this will be my last weekly update for the Star. I’ll be continuing the fact-checking at CNN beginning on June 17. Thank you for reading all this time.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

All 351 false things Trump said since Daniel Dale took time off:

MONDAY, APRIL 22

Twitter

The claim: “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach. It was the Democrats that committed the crimes, not your Republican President! Tables are finally turning on the Witch Hunt!”

In fact: At the time Trump tweeted, a single Democrat, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, had been charged with crimes related to Mueller’s work. There was no apparent basis for Trump’s broader claim that “the Democrats committed the crimes,” which suggested there was broad Russia-related criminal wrongdoing by his Democratic opponents. Also, Trump misleadingly omitted the convictions of several people in his orbit. Mueller secured convictions from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy chairman Rick Gates, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in a case that grew out of Mueller’s work.

Twitter

The claim: “Only high crimes and misdemeanors can lead to impeachment. There were no crimes by me (No Collusion, No Obstruction), so you can’t impeach. It was the Democrats that committed the crimes, not your Republican President! Tables are finally turning on the Witch Hunt!”

In fact: Even if we accept Trump’s premise that he has not committed crimes: you can indeed impeach a president who has not committed crimes. “High crimes and misdemeanors” do not have to be actual crimes; the phrase can cover such non-criminal matters such as actions unbecoming a president or non-criminally abusive of the office. Congress gets to decide what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

TUESDAY, APRIL 23

Twitter

The claim: “I wonder if the New York Times will apologize to me a second time, as they did after the 2016 Election. But this one will have to be a far bigger & better apology.”

In fact: The Times did not apologize to Trump after the election. Trump was referring to a post-election letter, a kind of sales pitch, in which Times leaders thanked readers and said they planned to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”

Twitter

The claim: “’The best thing ever to happen to Twitter is Donald Trump.’ @MariaBartiromo So true, but they don’t treat me well as a Republican. Very discriminatory, hard for people to sign on. Constantly taking people off list.”

In fact: While Twitter did conduct a widespread purge of fake accounts in 2018, which resulted in many users including Trump losing some so-called “followers,” there is no evidence Twitter has done anything to make it “hard for people to sign on” to follow or read him.

Twitter

The claim: “In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism. Remember, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ Today I have, as President, perhaps the greatest economy in history...and to the Mainstream Media, it means NOTHING. But it will!”

In fact: As Bill Clinton could tell Trump, a strong economy does not make a president immune from criticism. “The economy, stupid” was a piece of messaging advice to Clinton for the 1992 campaign — before he was president — not a statement about immunity from criticism.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (2 false claims)

The claim: “Unemployment numbers are the best they’ve ever been by far.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not “the best they’ve ever been by far”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “We just went through the Mueller witch hunt, where you had, really, 18 angry Democrats that hate President Trump. They hate him with a passion. They were contributors, in many cases, to Hillary Clinton. Hate him with a passion. How they picked this panel, I don’t know. And they came up with no collusion and they actually also came up with no obstruction. But our attorney general ruled, based on the information, there was no obstruction. So you have no collusion, no obstruction.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not “(come) up with no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. Trump was correct about the attorney general, William Barr, who declared that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.

Twitter

The claim: “Mexico’s Soldiers recently pulled guns on our National Guard Soldiers, probably as a diversionary tactic for drug smugglers on the Border. Better not happen again!”

In fact: There was no evidence that the Mexican soldiers were intending to create a diversion for drug smugglers; the U.S. military itself said the incident was a misunderstanding by the Mexicans, who mistakenly believed that U.S. soldiers sitting in an unmarked vehicle near the border in Texas were in Mexican territory. Navy Capt. Pamela Kunze, a U.S. military spokeswoman, told the Washington Post: “An inquiry by (Customs and Border Protection) and (the Department of Defense) revealed that the Mexican military members mistakenly believed the U.S. Army soldiers were south of the border with Mexico. However, the U.S. soldiers were appropriately in U.S. territory. Though they were south of the border fence, U.S. soldiers remained in U.S. territory, north of the actual border.” Kunze continued: “We believe this brief exchange was a misunderstanding concerning the location of the unmarked U.S. surveillance vehicle and an honest mistake by the Mexican soldiers. The Mexican military has been and continues to be a great partner with the United States military.”

Twitter

The claim: “I didn’t call Bob Costa of the Washington Post, he called me (Returned his call)! Just more Fake News.”

In fact: This is nonsensical. Returning a call counts as calling someone. And there was nothing “fake” about the news account of the call: Costa had tweeted that he contacted Trump first. “President Trump called me this evening, in response to my request for comment on a profile story on a Trump World figure,” Costa wrote.

Twitter

The claim: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct, the VA is not broken, it is doing great. But that is only because of the Trump Administration. We got Veterans Choice & Accountability passed.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law by Obama in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

Speech to summit on prescription drug and heroin abuse summit (7 false claims)

The claim: “And, by the way, for the veterans, 45 years they’ve been trying to get it. As you know, just recently, I signed Veterans Choice, where a veteran can go, and if the wait is going to be days or weeks or months — which it used to be — they go out and see a private doctor. Take immediate care. We pay for it. We take care of it. And it’s been an incredible — it’s new and it’s been incredible, the difference it’s made.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “And criminal justice reform — I have to say, people are getting out of prison. And since our founding, they were having an impossible time getting a job. But because our economy is doing so well, perhaps the best it’s ever been in our history — best unemployment numbers in history, best everything. Because of this — because of this, prisoners getting out are signing in; they’re getting jobs.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “And these newly employed citizens are joining 5.5 million more workers who have found jobs since the election, driving our national unemployment rate to its lowest level in 51 years.”

In fact: Trump was at least a little off. The latest published unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke in April 2019, for March 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000 — 19 years prior, if you don’t count earlier parts of Trump’s own term. In May 2019, it was announced that the April rate was 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “You probably saw the numbers today. We are detaining, capturing — call it anything you want — more people than ever before.”

In fact: U.S. authorities were indeed apprehending high numbers of people at the Mexican border at the time: 109,144 in April 2019, a new one-month high for the Trump era. But it was not even close to a record. In 2000, 180,050 people were apprehended in April. In 2001, it was 142,813 in April. In 2002, it was 121,921. In 2004, it was 135,468. In 2005, it was 140,062.

The claim: “Soon, we’re going to have a wall that’s going to be a very powerful wall. It’s under construction. The media doesn’t like talking about it. The media doesn’t like talking about it. It’s one of many things we’re doing. But when that wall is finished, we intend to have almost 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “You know, we had billions of dollars of military equipment, which the previous administration, for their own reason, was not willing to give up to law enforcement. And I decided that we will. This was beautiful, great, strong, powerful equipment, safety equipment. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And we gave billions and billions of dollars throughout the United States to law enforcement.”

In fact: The Defense Logistics Agency, which oversees the “1033” program in which surplus military equipment is transferred to police forces, told us that the total value of the transfers during the Trump era is much less than “billions and billions of dollars.” As of May 23, 2019, it was $154 million in the 2019 fiscal year, $276 million in the 2018 fiscal year, and $504 million in the 2017 fiscal year, a total of under $1 billion. It was $516 million in the Obama-era 2016 fiscal year, $418 million in the 2015 fiscal year.

The claim: “We’re also working very strong on drug pricing. It’s coming way down. For the first time — for the first time in 54 years, drug prices went down this year. They went down a little below even. That’s a big thing. First time in 54 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “54 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

Twitter

The claim: “All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops — and we caught them in the act! We waited for Mueller and WON, so now the Dems look to Congress as last hope!”

In fact: There is no evidence that crimes were committed by the Democrats or the people who investigated the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.

THURSDAY, APRIL 25

Interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity (12 false claims)

The claim: “But these were the two that talked about the insurance policy just in case Hillary loses. If she loses, we’ve got an insurance policy. Well, that was the insurance policy. Now, she lost and now they are trying to infiltrate the administration to — really, it’s a coup.”And: “So, I really say, now we have to get down because this was a coup. This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government. We had people coming out to vote from all over this country that are in love with what we are doing. It’s called Make America Great Again. That’s what we have done and we are doing. And this was an overthrow and it’s a disgraceful thing. And I don’t — I think it’s far bigger than Watergate.”And: “...the greatest political scandal in the history of our country, again, bigger than Watergate, because it means so much. This was a coup. This wasn’t stealing information from an office in the Watergate apartments. This was an attempted coup. And it’s inconceiv — like a third world country — and inconceivable.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: Trump: “I remember the young sailor. In fact, I helped him out with his family -” Question: “Kristian Saucier.” Trump: “- because I thought he was so unfairly treated as you know. I remember he had confidential information which is a much, much lower standard than classified. And they put him in jail for a long time. They took away his life.”

In fact: Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, whom Trump pardoned, was convicted of illegally retaining national defense information after he took and kept cellphone photos of restricted areas of a submarine. The information was classified as “confidential.” That is the lowest level of classification, but it still counts as classified.

The claim: “And then you look at what Hillary Clinton did with 33,000 emails and hundreds of thousands of text messages or emails going through the Weiner server or computer. Hundreds of thousands of which many were classified. And nothing happens to her. And, yet, they put a young sailor on for doing something innocent, showing his mother and his friend what the desk looked like, the desk in a 40-year-old submarine. I think Russia and China would have had that picture many years ago.”

In fact: Navy sailor Kristian Saucier was charged in 2015 for illegally taking and retaining classified photos, in 2009, of the nuclear-powered attack submarine he worked on. The submarine, launched in 1990, was less than 20 years old, not 40. According to the charging document, the photos were not of “the desk”; they showed the nuclear reactor compartment within the engine room, the auxiliary steam propulsion control panel, and significant control panels. According to the U.S. government in court filings: “According to the U.S. Navy, the photographs captured the nerve center of the submarine and would cause damage to national security if disclosed. An examination of the photographs, as well as the dates and times when they were taken, indicate that the photographs were not taken at random, but rather increased in both sensitivity and level of detail and methodically documented the entire propulsion system of the submarine.” Saucier was not charged for showing the photos to his mother and friend; they were discovered on a phone he had discarded at a local garbage dump. And Saucier was accused of intentionally trying to destroy evidence.

The claim: “We are doing numbers that nobody has ever believed. Probably the best economy we’ve ever had. Best unemployment numbers we’ve ever had. It’s been incredible.” And: “We have had the biggest cut in regulations which is one of the things creating all these great jobs because we have the best unemployment numbers that we’ve ever had. Today, we have the most people working literally today, just came out. We have the most people working than we have ever had in the history of our country. Almost 160 million people are working...”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was low, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.) Though there have been sporadic blips, the total number of employed people tends to simply rise as the population grows, and it is not considered a good measure of unemployment.

The claim: “And everything they did was so dishonest. And then, we really started looking into a lot of things like her deleted emails and acid washed emails which is unheard of because of the expense of doing it, and how she got away with it, how her lawyer got away with it, how all of these things happened.”

In fact: “Acid washed” is a nonsensical Trump invention. Clinton’s team deleted emails using a free computer software program called BleachBit. Trump seized on the phrase “bleach,” though the program does not involve actual bleach, and transformed it into “acid.”

The claim: “Well, it was, as I call them, 13 angry Democrats. They were supplanted by five more, five more were added. And you got up to 18, 19, 20, they are all Democrats, many of them made major contributions to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And they had one of them was one of the top people at the Clinton Foundation, Jeannie Rhee.”

In fact: The Robert Mueller investigation was, of course, run by a Republican, Mueller himself. We’ll ignore Trump’s characterization of the others on the team as “angry Democrats,” but it is false that Rhee was “one of the top people at the Clinton Foundation.” Rhee represented the Clinton Foundation, as an outside counsel, in its defence against a 2015 lawsuit. She was not involved in the management of the foundation.

The claim: “And, you know, Bob Mueller, I turned him down to run the FBI, the next day, he was appointed to be this — special counsel as they call it. It’s a really much tougher word than that I won’t use it. And it was a terrible thing. He was conflicted for that reason. He also was conflicted because of the fact that Comey and him are best friends. So, if not best, very close to best. But I would say best friends. You look at pictures of the two of them in the past.”

In fact: There is no evidence, including photo evidence, that the two former FBI directors are “best friends” or even “close to best.” (Trump previously made a false claim that “I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other”; zero such photos have been provided or unearthed.) Though they do know and like each other, and though it is fair for Trump to argue that it was inappropriate for Mueller to conduct an investigation involving Comey, nobody has produced any kind of proof that they were more than professional associates when both were at the FBI. Comey’s lawyer has said: “Jim and Bob are friends in the sense that co-workers are friends. They don’t really have a personal relationship. Jim has never been to Bob’s house and Bob has never been to Jim’s house.”

The claim: “Well, I don’t know who it is going to be. Maybe Sanders or maybe Biden. I think, you know, when you look at Joe — I have known Joe over the years. He is not the brightest light bulb in the group, I don’t think, but he has a name that they know. He is coming on with some little cute statements about me that he talked about the way the world is today. Well, I will tell you the way the world is today is we have a strong military. We have Choice for our veterans. They have choice now instead of waiting in line all day long, all week long, all month long. They have choice. They can go out to a private doctor. We pay the bill and they don’t have to die waiting in line.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually created under the Obama-Biden administration, in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “No, the whole thing is crazy. The New Green Deal, OK, and it’s got to be some kind of a joke. It’s got to be — they have to be kidding but, you know, I saw the senator from Hawaii who was so nasty to Judge Kavanaugh...But she was so nasty to now judge, Justice Kavanaugh, so horrible. And they asked her about it, the New Green Deal. They said, how about that? And she goes, ‘Well, I’m in Hawaii and I understand they won’t allow airplanes.’ And she said, ‘It’s hard for me but I will approve it anyway. Even though there is no way to -’ Somebody said they will build a train to Hawaii. No, it’s a crazy thing. I can’t believe they are really serious.”

In fact: This is not at all what happened. It is not true that Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono thought or thinks that air travel to Hawaii would be outlawed by the Green New Deal proposal put forward by a group of Democratic legislators. When asked by a reporter about the suggestion of eliminating air travel, Hirono said that would be “pretty hard for Hawaii,” then laughed: the Green New Deal resolution Hirono endorsed does not call for the elimination of air travel. Rather, it calls for “overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail.”(When Trump first made a version of this claim in February, Hirono told HawaiiNewsNow: “As usual, climate change denier Donald Trump makes things up and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. While the Green New Deal is an ambitious plan to combat climate change, it does not call for the elimination of air travel. I will continue to fight against this president’s lies.”) Trump did not make up this entire claim out of thin air: a “FAQ” page posted by a leading Green New Deal proponent, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the 29-year-old Trump was deriding — calls for the government to “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” But other Democrats did not endorse the FAQ, just the official resolution, and Ocasio-Cortez’s office quickly deleted it.

The claim: “But we’re up for a bid — we are building many sections of wall right now that’s under construction right now.And I intend to have by the end of next year over 400 miles of wall which renovated a lot of wall already. A lot of the wall was, you know, I’m good at this stuff. That’s what I do. We renovated a lot. We had wall that was falling down but structurally strong or can be strong. So we saved a lot of money. We renovated. We fixed it and it’s much quicker and frankly much less expensive. So, we have renovated a lot and we built a lot. We built a lot of new wall. In some cases, we have ripped all wall down because it was in too bad of shape and we built brand new wall. But we are building a lot of sections. And actually, over the next two to three weeks, we are giving out at lot of different sections.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “I fired nobody other than Comey, and very interesting and that was early and people don’t talk about that, but the very interesting thing about firing Comey is that everybody wanted him fired, all the Democrats. I mean, virtually everybody, the Democrats thought he was horrible. The Republicans thought he was horrible. And I said, you know, this is going to be wonderful. I’m going to fire this guy. When he gets fired, I think it would be popular. It thought it was go going to be bipartisan firing. And he got fired and the Democrats sat back and they though, and the same people that two days earlier saying how horrible he was, were saying, oh, this is a terrible thing.”

In fact: It is not true that “all the Democrats” wanted Comey fired, much less “virtually everybody” in general. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, current Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

The claim: “I’ll show you how dishonest the press was. I went down to El Paso. We did a tremendous rally, I guess we had 35,000 people between inside and out, at least. And he had 502 people, and the press said, ‘They both had big rallies. They both had big rallies.’ I said, wait a minute, one has close to 40,000 people, one has 500 people, and they were very much comparing them.”

In fact: Both of Trump’s numbers were inaccurate. His competitor, former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, obviously drew more than “502 people” to his event; Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg reported at the time: “El Paso police estimate a crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 for the anti-Trump, anti-wall, pro-O’Rourke march and rally tonight.” The Texas Tribune reported that “about 7,000 people went to see O’Rourke speak at the park (after the march), according to an aide, who cited law enforcement.” Even if both estimates were too high, the real number was clearly in the thousands. In addition, there were not “35,000 people” at Trump’s rally, even if you count people outside. El Paso’s fire department issued a rough estimate of up to 3,500, though it said it did not closely track the number outside; local journalist Bob Moore tweeted, “El Paso County Coliseum officials tell me about 6,000 people watched the @realDonaldTrump rally on screens outside, on top of the 7,000 inside.” Trump’s venue, the El Paso County Coliseum, had an official capacity of 6,500 people, not 8,000. El Paso Fire Department spokesperson Enrique Aguilar told U.S. news outlets, including the El Paso Times, that Trump was incorrect when he claimed at the time that the fire department had let in extra people. Aguilar said “no special permission was given by the Fire Department, and the Coliseum had about 6,500 people in it during the president’s rally — at capacity, but well within its standard allowance,” the El Paso Times reported.

Twitter

The claim: “.....Despite the fact that the Mueller Report was ‘composed’ by Trump Haters and Angry Democrats, who had unlimited funds and human resources, the end result was No Collusion, No Obstruction. Amazing!”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Twitter

The claim: “...Mueller was NOT fired and was respectfully allowed to finish his work on what I, and many others, say was an illegal investigation (there was no crime), headed by a Trump hater who was highly conflicted, and a group of 18 VERY ANGRY Democrats. DRAIN THE SWAMP!”

In fact: There is simply no evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia was illegal. An investigation does not need to find a crime to be a legal investigation. Plus, there were crimes. Mueller secured convictions from former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy chairman Rick Gates, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in a case that grew out of Mueller’s work.

FRIDAY, APRIL 26

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (2 false claims)

The claim: “What we’re doing in this country, financially, with the military, with our veterans — if you look at veterans, we now have Veterans Choice. Nobody has ever done what I’ve done in their first two years.”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law by Obama in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “We did not pay money for our great Otto. There was no money paid. That was a fake news report that money was paid. I haven’t paid money for any hostage.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, its story never said the U.S. paid any money to secure the return of Otto Warmbier from North Korea. The Post wrote: “The Washington Post never reported that Trump paid the bill. The Post reported that North Korea submitted a $2 million bill for the hospice care of American Otto Warmbier, the comatose University of Virginia student sent home from Pyongyang in 2017. The main U.S. envoy sent to retrieve Warmbier signed an agreement to pay the medical bill on instructions passed down from Trump, according to The Post article. The bill went to the Treasury Department, where it remained — unpaid — throughout 2017. The report did not speculate about whether any payment was made since then as Trump has met twice with North Korea’s leader. National Security Advisor John Bolton later confirmed The Post report.”

Speech to the National Rifle Association (8 false claims)

The claim: “Every day of my administration, we are taking power out of Washington, D.C. and returning it to the American people, where it belongs. And you see it now better than ever, with all of the resignations of all of the bad apples. They’re bad apples. They tried for a coup; didn’t work out so well. And I didn’t need a gun for that one, did I? All was taking place at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. You’ve been watching, you’ve been seeing. You’ve been looking at things that you wouldn’t have believed possible in our country. Corruption at the highest level — a disgrace. Spying, surveillance, trying for an overthrow. And we caught them. We caught them. Who would have thought in our country?”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: “Unemployment recently achieved its lowest rate in 51 years, and very shortly, it should be its lowest rate in the history of our country.”

In fact: Trump was at least a little off. The latest published unemployment rate at the time Trump spoke in April 2019, for March 2019, was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000 — 19 years prior, if you don’t count earlier parts of Trump’s own term. In May 2019, it was announced that the April rate was 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “So, in the last administration, President Obama signed the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. And in his waning days in office, he sent the treaty to the Senate to begin the ratification process. This treaty threatened your subjugate — and you know exactly what’s going on here — your rights and your constitutional and international rules and restrictions and regulations.”

In fact: Trump stumbled over this sentence, which appeared to be an attempt to say that the treaty threatened to subjugate gun owners’ rights to international rules, regulations and restrictions. That is false. The treaty addresses the international trade in weapons and seeks to eradicate illicit international trade, but it does not hinder the rights of gun owners in individual countries, as the non-partisan Congressional Research Service noted in a March 2019 report: “The ATT regulates trade in conventional weapons between and among countries. It does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country.” The research service also noted: “Because the United States already has strong export control laws in place, the ATT would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations, or law.” The treaty’s very preamble says it reaffirms “the sovereign right of any State to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system,” and it says the treaty is “mindful of the legitimate trade and lawful ownership, and use of certain conventional arms for recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities, where such trade, ownership and use are permitted or protected by law.”

The claim: “The Democrats are also working hard to block the wall, but we are building the wall. They’re not happy about it. And we will have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. We’re building a lot of wall, and I want to thank Border Patrol. I want to thank our great military...So we’ll have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. It’s going up rapidly. Rapidly. We’re also renovating tremendous stretches of wall. We have wall that’s in bad shape but it’s structurally sound. And rather than building new, we renovate it. We make it as good as new, save a lot of money, and we gain a lot of territory. So we have a lot of great things going.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “If we kept the same interest rates and the same quantitative easing that the previous administration had, that 3.2 per cent would have been much higher than that. But they hadn’t hit these numbers in 16 years.”

In fact: Trump’s “hadn’t hit these numbers in 16 years” is incorrect even if he was only talking about first-quarter growth. The economy grew by 3.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

The claim: “Today, I want to give a few of these brave citizens the chance to share their stories directly with the American people. A lot of television back there. Of course, when I start going after them, you watch those red lights go off. They don’t want any part of it. They turn those lights. Then they come back. They need the ratings. They come back.”

In fact: Though somebody may have done it at some point, there is no evidence for Trump’s regular claim that media outlets regularly turn off their cameras or stop broadcasting live when he is criticizing the media, then resume televising the speech when he is finished the criticism.

The claim: “But I want to thank you all for your courage, because you’re really living proof that law-abiding gun owners make a tremendous, tremendous difference. Tremendous difference. You know, Paris, France, they say, has the strongest gun laws in the world. And you remember those maniacs, when they went into the nightclub. I use this example. There are many examples. But they shot one person, another person, another person, another person. Hundreds of people dead and horribly wounded to this day. That was five years ago. If there was one gun being carried by one person on the other side, it very well could have been a whole different result. The shooting went on so long and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. ‘Get over here.’ Boom. ‘Get over here.’ Boom. And then they left. They were captured later. If there was only one gun. If there were two, three, four, it wouldn’t have happened. Tiny percentage, by comparison. But it probably wouldn’t have happened because the cowards would’ve known there are people in there having guns. Wouldn’t have happened.”

In fact: “Hundreds dead” is a slight exaggeration: 130 people died in the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. Also, France does not have the strongest gun laws in the world. Philip Alpers, director of GunPolicy.org at the Sydney School of Public Health, said in an email, “This is a claim made by (and for) a range of countries, but it can never be true. Singapore has the death penalty for firearm trafficking, China and several others prohibit all private possession, the U.K. has banned all handguns. All of these go way beyond the toughest equivalents in France, or even Australia.”

The claim: “And, by the way — and Mueller finished out his report: no collusion and no obstruction.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Interview with Mark Levin (4 false claims)

The claim: “And don’t forget the 600,000 text messages from — that went through the server of Weiner — of Weiner, that’s a beauty, not a word in there about any of this.”

In fact: More than 600,000 total emails were allegedly found by the FBI on disgraced former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They were not text messages — Trump might have confused the story with Weiner’s sexting scandals — and we do not know how many were related to Clinton or the 2016 campaign in any way.

The claim: “And President Obama knew all about Russia in September just before the election and didn’t do a thing about it because he thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So he didn’t do a thing about it. He only got upset about it after the results were very conclusive, 306 to 223.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he “didn’t do anything.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “And President Obama knew all about Russia in September just before the election and didn’t do a thing about it because he thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So he didn’t do a thing about it. He only got upset about it after the results were very conclusive, 306 to 223.”

In fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip: it was the 24th time Trump said “223” as president.

The claim: “...that didn’t start with Mueller that started long before Mueller, that was a coup. They were really — there was a coup that started long before Mueller.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

Meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2 false claims)

https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-shinzo-abe-japan-bilat-april-26-2019

The claim: “We’ll be discussing, very strongly, agriculture. Because, as the Prime Minister knows, Japan puts very massive tariffs on agriculture — our agriculture — going for many years, going into Japan. And we want to get rid of those tariffs. Because we don’t tariff their cars, so I think that that will — something we’ll work out.”

In fact: The U.S. imposes a 2.5 per cent tariff on imported Japanese cars.

The claim: “The fact is that Japanese car companies are coming in at a level that we haven’t seen in many decades. Toyota is investing $14 billion over a short period of time, and others too. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky.”

In fact: There are no assembly plants in Pennsylvania at all, noted Bernard Swiecki, director of the Automotive Communities Partnership at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, and there are no known plans to bring one there. (Trump might perhaps have been speaking about some smaller kind of company in the broader auto industry.)

SATURDAY, APRIL 27

Campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin (35 false claims)

The claim: “And Prime Minister Abe, we’re negotiating trade deals because every country has been ripping us off for years. And I really like the prime minister, he’s a friend of mine, but I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, we’ve got to do something.’ “For so many decades we’ve been losing tens of billions of dollars to China and Japan, and India, and name any country and we lost, but we’re not losing anymore. And I said, ‘Listen, we got to do something.’” Sixty-eight billion in trade losses over the last four, five years a year. So we’re renegotiating, and I think you’ll be fair, I think you’ll be fair.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods, but, as always, Trump did not specify that he was doing so.

The claim: “For so many decades we’ve been losing tens of billions of dollars to China and Japan, and India, and name any country and we lost, but we’re not losing anymore. And I said, ‘Listen, we got to do something.’”

In fact: The U.S. does not have a trade deficit with every country. It had surpluses in 2017 with more than half of its trading partners, according to data from the U.S. government’s own International Trade Commission, including Hong Kong, Brazil, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Chile, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Kuwait and dozens more countries and territories.

The claim: “I think Pocahontas, she’s finished, she’s out, she’s gone. Now, when it was found that I had more Indian blood in me than she did. And then it was determined that I had none, but I still had more.”

In fact: A Stanford University professor who conducted a DNA test on Warren concluded that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor” six to 10 generations in the past. The analysis found that almost all of Warren’s ancestors were European, and many Native Americans reject the suggestion that a distant Native ancestor can qualify a person as any part Native. But it is not true that Warren has “no Indian blood.”

The claim: “And I have to say, I was saying on the way over, they told me about bad weather, by the way, we may have to cancel tonight. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ Now can you imagine? I learned this morning, they thought you could have a big snowstorm, right? A big, big snowstorm. The people that get it wrong, the most are the weather forecasters and the political analysts. Now they said there’s a big, big storm, it’s going to be hitting Green Bay. we may have to cancel. I said, ‘Like hell, we’re going to cancel. People are standing out.’”

In fact: As the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang pointed out, nobody had forecast a storm for Green Bay. The Post wrote: “Green Bay was never under a winter storm warning, winter storm watch or even a winter weather advisory. The ‘big, big’ snow totals the president referenced simply were never predicted by any commercial or government weather agency.” The Post explained: “...the forecast wasn’t wrong. There was a storm, but hundreds of miles to the south. Wet snow blanketed southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, including Chicago. The system was not expected to hit northern Wisconsin.”

The claim: “I told President Xi, he’s a friend of mine. I said, ‘Listen, this can’t be like a good deal for both. This has to be a deal -’ because we have been losing to China for many years, $500 billion a year. We have rebuilt China. We’ve given them so much. Well think of it. Let’s cash, you know, they can say it’s surplus, they can say it’s deficit, call it whatever it is, we will lose it cash. We’re giving them five hundred, how the hell can you do it.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “And as Prime Minister Abe said to me today, he said nobody’s ever talked to me this way from our country. It’s true. No, he said it friendly. He — he said it friendly, he’s a friend of mine, but he said nobody from this country, no president has ever said this. You know, nobody ever even talked about it. We lose $75 billion a year.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods.

The claim: “Japan, as an example, sells us their cars, the cars come in, no tax. They don’t take our cars. Other than that it’s a very fair deal. So the cars come in. Essentially, it’s two and a half per cent, but essentially it’s not tax.”

In fact: The U.S. indeed has a 2.5 per cent tariff on cars imported from Japan. There is no basis for saying “essentially it’s not tax.”

The claim: “Japan, as an example, sells us their cars, the cars come in, no tax. They don’t take our cars. Other than that it’s a very fair deal. So the cars come in. Essentially, it’s two and a half per cent, but essentially it’s not tax. Our agriculture, they don’t want it. We want to sell the agriculture. So they sell cars, we sell practically nothing. That’s how we have these massive imbalances with so many countries.”

In fact: Japan was the fourth-largest market for U.S. agricultural exports in 2018, buying $12.9 billion worth of product, according to Trump’s Department of Agriculture.

The claim: “I really believe that it’s been said, but make America Great Again. Ronald Reagan used, seldom, Let’s Make America Great, close but not the same. Let’s, apostrophe S, you don’t want the apostrophe, it’s too complicated, doesn’t work. But Ronald Reagan was good. He said Let’s Make, but he didn’t use it and we use it a little bit. We seriously used it, right? MAGA.”

In fact: Reagan used the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump omitted the “Again.”

The claim: “Six hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. Remember, President Obama said, ‘Manufacturing jobs are gone. You need a wand, a magic wand.’ We found the magic wand , because they’re coming and they’re coming fast, and those are great jobs.”

In fact: Obama did not say “manufacturing jobs are gone.” At a televised PBS town hall in Elkhart, Indiana in 2016, Obama did say that a certain subset of manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back” — but he boasted that some manufacturers are indeed “coming back to the United States,” that “we’ve seen more manufacturing jobs created since I’ve been president than any time since the 1990s,” and that “we actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today, than we’ve had in most of our history.” Obama did mock Trump for Trump’s campaign claims that he was going to bring back manufacturing jobs that had been outsourced to Mexico, saying: “And when somebody says — like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for — that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.” But, again, Obama made clear that he was talking about a certain segment of manufacturing jobs, not all of them.

The claim: “And after years and years of declining wages, wages are rising for the first time in 21 years.”

In fact: Wages have been rising since 2014. As PolitiFact reported: “For much of the time between 2012 and 2014, median weekly earnings were lower than they were in 1979 — a frustrating disappearance of any wage growth for 35 years. But that began changing in 2014. After hitting a low of $330 a week in early 2014, wages have risen to $354 a week by early 2017. That’s an increase of 7.3 percent over a roughly three-year period.” FactCheck.org reported: “For all private workers, average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose 4% during Obama’s last four years in office.”

The claim: “And people that are now able to go out, you know, we got Veterans Choice.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “And you know something that is very important to me and very important to — because of you, to keep family farms, ranches, and small businesses together in the family. When you pass on and go to heaven so you can look down at these great children and you don’t like your children, don’t listen to what I’m going to say. Probably a couple of you out there just say, you know, ‘I don’t like a kid. I’m not leaving them my damn farm, right?’ Anybody in here like that, raise your hand. No don’t. But on the assumption that you love your kids, and you love your family, and you want to leave the farm, you remember what used to happen. The estate tax was 45, 50, 55 per cent. They had to go out and borrow money and sometimes the land is worth more than the income and they couldn’t do it in the banks end up in the banks fight them, and that’s not what they do for a living, the kids, and they lose the farm, they lose the ranch, they lose the small business, right? Well, we have eliminated the unfair estate tax or death tax on all of those things. Zero. Zero, that’s a good one.”

In fact: The top estate tax rate prior to Trump taking office was 40 per cent, not “45, 50, 55.” More significantly, Trump has not “eliminated” the estate tax, let alone ensured “you don’t have to pay any estate taxes”: his tax law merely raised the threshold at which the tax must be paid. Also, it is highly misleading to suggest that the estate tax was a major burden on family farms and small businesses: very few of them were paying the tax even before Trump’s tax law was passed. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses were among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017, before Trump’s tax law. The Center wrote on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 of the total estate tax revenue.”

The claim: “You remember that I used to do it when I was a civilian when I had no idea, I was going to be running for president, right? I had no idea. I used to say what the hell is going on in Michigan. They gave me an award six years, seven years ago. I had no idea. It was the man of the year in Michigan.”

In fact: The Star and other fact-checkers looked into this claim when Trump began making it during the 2016 campaign. None of us could find any evidence that Trump had been given such an award. We will update this item if any evidence emerges.

The claim: “I also ended up another one, you know, the great Paris Accord. How — how’s Paris doing lately? How’s Paris? How’s Paris doing? Send all the money to countries that the people never heard of and raised their taxes. I ended that one too. I thought I was going to take a lot of heat on that one. Saved a lot of money, saved a lot of jobs, saved a lot of businesses. I said, you know when I end this Paris Accord, I’m going to take heat. I didn’t even take heat. My people understood it, it was a ripoff. It didn’t allow us to use our wealth, would have stolen our jobs, but just take a look at what’s happening to other places where they’re trying to do it. And we had something we would have never ever been able to adhere to the rules, they were so strict on us. You know, China can sign rule. They’re not going to be sued by Greenpeace. If Greenpeace goes to China, that’s the end of Greenpeace, you never see them again. So China doesn’t care if they violate Greenpeace and some of these other wonderful environmental groups. But the United States get sued and we adhere to these things. It’s a little bit different. We would have lost our ass on that deal.”

In fact: As usual, Trump’s description of the Paris climate accord was comprehensively inaccurate. It did not set strict “rules” on the U.S., and it would not have “stolen our jobs.” Rather, it simply allowed each nation to set its own voluntary targets for reducing emissions. If Trump thought Obama’s voluntary targets — reducing emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent by 2025 — were too burdensome on its economy, he could simply have changed them;

The claim: “””The poverty rate for Wisconsin families has reached the lowest rate in 22 years.””

In fact: PolitiFact looked at this claim in detail and found it false: “Trump said Wisconsin’s poverty rate for families is at the lowest level in 22 years. Three measurements used by experts say that’s not the case. Indeed, the Census survey that goes back as far as Trump’s claim shows 2017 was just the fifth-lowest rate for individuals in the last 22 years. And a Wisconsin-specific measure looking more comprehensively at poverty by factoring in government aid shows the most recent year of data — 2016 in that case — is right around the average from the last decade.

The claim: “As one example, we charge other countries zero tariffs on foreign paper products, but when Wisconsin paper companies export it abroad, they sent their product abroad, China charged us big tariffs, India charged us big tariffs, Vietnam charge(d) us massive tariffs. Unfair.”

In fact: Daowei Zhang, a professor of forest economics at Auburn University, said Trump is correct that other countries’ tariffs on paper products are higher than those of the U.S., “but he’s not right that the U.S. has no tariff.” Overall, he said, U.S. paper tariffs are around 1 per cent or slightly higher.

The claim: “Look at Harley-Davidson. Look at Harley-Davidson. I met with them three years ago, one of my first meetings, Harley-Davidson. And I said to the people, they’re very nice. They would tell me, tough to do business in certain countries — ‘How you’re doing in India?’ and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t do any business.’ They weren’t even complaining, because — so many years. So India charged a 100 per cent tariff on a Harley-Davidson, but when they send their motorcycles, and they make ‘em, us, we charge them nothing.”

In fact: We obviously weren’t in this meeting, but it is inconceivable that Harley-Davidson executives told Trump that they “don’t do any business” in India. Harley-Davidson has had an Indian subsidiary, Harley-Davidson India, since 2009, and it runs a factory in India. According to Indian business newspaper Business Daily, the company sold 4,708 units in India in 2015-2016, 3,680 in 2016-2017.

The claim: “Look at Harley-Davidson. Look at Harley-Davidson. I met with them three years ago, one of my first meetings, Harley-Davidson. And I said to the people, they’re very nice. They would tell me, tough to do business in certain countries — ‘How you’re doing in India?’ and they said, ‘Oh, we don’t do any business.’ They weren’t even complaining, because — so many years. So India charged a 100 per cent tariff on a Harley-Davidson, but when they send their motorcycles, and they make ‘em, us, we charge them nothing.”

In fact: “Nothing” is incorrect. As Trump himself said at a trade meeting with Republican lawmakers in January 2019, the U.S. has a 2.4 per cent tariff on Indian-made motorcycles. In an opinion piece for Fox Business in February 2019, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross wrote, “For example, our 2.5 percent tariff on cars is far less than China’s 15 percent and Europe’s 10 percent; our 2.4 percent tariff on motorcycles pales in comparison to India’s 50 percent.”

The claim: “It’s almost like habit, it’s more habit than anything else. Nobody does anything about it, but we do. There’s one country we lose $5 billion. I won’t say it. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. The last thing I want to do is embarrass somebody, but they lose. We spend $5 billion a year defending them, right. So I said to the generals, ‘How much do we spend?’ they say, ‘Sir, we spent $5 billion.’ Very wealthy country. I said, ‘How much do they pay?’ ‘Sir, they pay $500 million.’ I said, ‘You mean we lose four and a half billion dollars to defend it?’ And they’re rich. So I called the country, right, I called the country. So we lose four and a half billion for the privilege of defending a country. That’s very tough on us on trade and various other things. So I called, I said, ‘Listen, no good.’ Now that we’re in a state of shock because they never got a call like this in twenty five years. So I said, ‘It’s no good. We’re losing four and a half billion dollars. It’s no good. We can’t do this anymore, this is crazy.’ And he got very upset. Angry. ‘This is not fair.’ I said, ‘Of course it’s fair.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll give you 500 million more because the budget you see had already been set, there’s only a month left.’ So you know, I said, ‘You know what, I want more.’ We argued. So they paid us more than $500 million for one phone call. It took me one call. Now I’m not bragging, I hate the deal. No no, for one call. Ron knows. One call. First call they’ve had in 35 years. I don’t think they’ve ever had a call. One-sided horrible deal. So I said, ‘It’s OK. You know, I understand you have budgets. You know you go through a budget, but next year, which now turns out to be in about two weeks, I said we’re going to call you for much more. You got to pay, you got to pay, not fair. We’re defending you and you’re rich. You know, we can defend people. They’re not rich and they’re being horribly treated and human rights and all the sudden, that’s different. These are rich countries, but think of it, one phone call, we pick up $500 million, that’s not terrible, but now we’re going to pick up a lot more and we have that with many countries.”

In fact: Trump did not name the country — but he was clearly referring to South Korea, since this was almost precisely the story he has previously told about securing additional money from South Korea. However, his figures were wrong. South Korea previously paid about $850 million per year for the U.S. troop presence in the country; after Trump pressure, South Korea agreed to a one-year deal in which it would pay about $925 million — an increase of less than $100 million, not $500 million. The New York Times reported upon a previous version of this Trump claim: “South Koreans were left flustered on Wednesday after President Trump asserted that he had made their government pay $500 million more to help cover the cost of maintaining American troops in the country. The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal South Korea and the United States signed on Sunday after months of contentious negotiations. Under the one-year deal, this year South Korea will pay 1.04 trillion won, or $925 million, an increase of $70 million from last year’s $855 million.”

The claim: “Look, Saudi Arabia, very rich country, we defend them. We subsidize Saudi Arabia. They have nothing but cash, right? We subsidize and they buy a lot from us, $450 billion they bought, you know you had people wanting to cut off Saudi Arabia, they bought $450 billion, I don’t want to lose them.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that Saudi Arabia has agreed to make $450 billion in purchases from the U.S. The White House has never explained what Trump is talking about; PolitiFact reported: “Hossein Askari, a business professor at George Washington University, analyzes international trade in the Middle East. He knows of no tally of contracts to back up Trump’s assertion. ‘There is absolutely no such number that could support the $450 billion,’ Askari said.” Trump had previously claimed that Saudi Arabia was making $110 billion in military orders, which also appeared baseless; the Associated Press wrote: “Trump’s wrong to suggest that he has $110 billion in military orders from Saudi Arabia. A far smaller amount in sales has actually been signed...Details of the $110 billion arms package, partly negotiated under the Obama administration and agreed upon in May 2017, have been sketchy. At the time the Trump administration provided only a broad description of the defense equipment that would be sold. There was no public breakdown of exactly what was being offered for sale and for how much...The Pentagon said this month that Saudi Arabia has signed ‘letters of offer and acceptance’ for only $14.5 billion in sales, including helicopters, tanks, ships, weapons and training. Those letters, issued after the U.S. government has approved a proposed sale, specify its terms...Trump’s repeated claims that he’s signed $110 billion worth of new arms sales to Riyadh are ‘just not true,’ said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former CIA and Defense Department official.”

The claim: “So we’re getting ripped off on trade, we’re getting ripped off on military, by NATO, I’m all for NATO, but you know we’re paying for almost 100 per cent of defending Europe and they’re killing us on trade.”

In fact: The U.S. is not paying for “almost 100 per cent” of the cost of defending Europe. According to NATO’s 2018 annual report, U.S. defence spending — on everything, not just protecting Europe — represented 72 per cent of alliance members’ total defence spending in 2017. Of NATO’s own organizational budget, the U.S. contributes a much smaller agreed-upon percentage: 22 per cent

The claim: “The European Union, the EU is killing us. We lost $181 billion and we’re defending them for peanuts, it does — does it — does this make sense to you what I’m saying?”

In fact: The U.S. had a $110 billion trade deficit with the European Union in 2018 when both goods trade and services trade are included, according to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which uses a different method, the deficit in goods trade alone was $169 billion, still not $181 billion even if Trump had been more specific about what he was discussing.

The claim: “We’re building the wall by the way. We’re gonna have over 400 miles of wall built by the end of next year. You know, we can get money for anything. They were willing to give me money for every single thing, more money than I wanted. I said, I don’t need that much money, give me money for the wall.We’re not giving you anything for the wall. You know why? Because politically they don’t like it. So I went out and did it a different way and we have the money for the wall and we’re building the wall...”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “...their entire party has been taken over by far left radicals, who want to nullify and erase American borders. They want open borders. They want open borders. They want people to pour in and they think that’s going to be votes ultimately for them. These left wing extremists don’t believe America has the right to enforce our immigration laws or decide who gets to enter and remain in our country, not going to be that way...Democrats want to allow totally unlimited, uncontrolled, and unchecked migration all paid for by you, the American taxpayer.” And: “So Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, hoaxes, and delusions.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders or uncontrolled, unlimited migration. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Last month alone, 100,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders, placing a massive strain on communities, and schools, and hospitals, and public resources like nobody’s ever seen before. Now we’re sending many of them to sanctuary cities, thank you very much. They’re not too happy about it. I’m proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea, by the way. No. Hey, hey, what did they say? ‘We want ‘em.’ I said, ‘We’ll give ‘em to you. Thank you.’ They said, ‘We don’t want ‘em.’”

In fact: While Trump had publicly proposed sending migrants to sanctuary cities, this did not actually happen, his acting homeland security secretary, Kevin McAleenan, said on CBS in May.

The claim: “To confront the border crisis, I declared a national emergency. The good news is everybody agrees. Everybody agrees. Now, everybody’s in.”

In fact: Not “everybody agrees” or “everybody’s in”; Trump’s “national emergency” declaration was still highly controversial at the time, widely opposed by Democrats in particular.

The claim: “But your Democrat governor here in Wisconsin shockingly stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive, born alive. The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby. I don’t think so. Incredible. No, it’s incredible. Until this crazy man in Virginia said it, nobody even thought of that, right? Did anyone even think of that? Yeah, late-term. But this is where the baby is actually born, it came out, it’s there, it’s wrapped and that’s it. Who believes it?”

In fact: That is not what Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, the man Trump was calling “crazy,” actually said; his comments were far less clear and more nuanced. He told a radio station: “You know when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labour, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” The comments prompted an uproar from pro-life conservatives, who accused him of endorsing infanticide. Northam’s spokesperson, however, said he was speaking only about the rare cases where a woman with a non-viable pregnancy goes into labour. Regardless, Northam clearly did not talk about “executing” babies.

The claim: “Last year prescription drug prices went down for the first time in 51 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “54 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “Just yesterday, I announced that my administration is unsigning the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. We’re unsigning it, we’re pulling it back out of the United Nations. We’re pulling it back out of Congress. All of you Second Amendment people, you know you know what it is. You’ll be very happy with it because we will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on America’s freedom. We’re not going to allow it. That was a President Obama disaster.”

In fact: The treaty would not have trampled on American gun owners’ freedoms. The treaty addresses the international trade in weapons and seeks to eradicate illicit international trade, but it does not hinder the rights of gun owners in individual countries, as the non-partisan Congressional Research Service noted in a March 2019 report: “The ATT regulates trade in conventional weapons between and among countries. It does not affect sales or trade in weapons among private citizens within a country.” The research service also noted: “Because the United States already has strong export control laws in place, the ATT would likely require no significant changes to policy, regulations, or law.” The treaty’s very preamble says it reaffirms “the sovereign right of any State to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system,” and it says the treaty is “mindful of the legitimate trade and lawful ownership, and use of certain conventional arms for recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities, where such trade, ownership and use are permitted or protected by law.”

The claim: “And we’ll always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. The Republicans are always going to protect pre-existing conditions.”

In fact: This claim is belied by Republicans’ actions. The party tried repeatedly during Trump’s early presidency to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, Trump’s administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

The claim: “I withdrew from that horrible deal where they paid $150 billion to Iran.”

In fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.” It is also an exaggeration to say Iran was “taking over the Middle East” before Trump took office, though it exerted significant influence in several countries.

The claim: “I recognized Israel’s capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem and it would have opened in 25 years. What I said to our great ambassador, David Friedman, one of the most successful lawyers in New York, who became ambassador to Israel. I said, ‘David, they want to spend $1.1 billion, we could do it cheaper.’ They want to buy this piece of land in Jerusalem, top dollar. I said, ‘David, what can we do?’ And he called me back, he said, ‘Sir, we have a piece of land that’s much better, and on that piece of land, we have an old building. We’re not using the building very much and we can renovate the building for $400,000 and we’ll have a beautiful embassy and a better location, and we can have it done and so we can have it done in four months instead of 25 years.’ So here’s your alternative, a building at a great location in four months for $400,000 or a building that will probably never get built, but let’s say 20 years. For $1.1 billion today, meaning $3, $4 billion in a lousy location. That won’t be as good as what we built and it’s the first time I’ve had ever done this. He said four hundred thousand. I said, ‘David, it’s too cheap.’ We have to make it. It’s true. I said, ‘Make it $500,000.’ It’s true. It’s True. And it’s open. We opened it like almost a year ago. And you know in New York I have a friend who’s a very successful guy. He’s very proud of his office because he used to think, oh, Jerusalem stone. This is stone from Jerusalem, it’s one of the most expensive. He considers it a treasure. And every time I go in he says, oh, look at my beautiful stone, it’s from Jerusalem. So we’re building a building in Jerusalem. I said, ‘David, do me a favor, buy Jerusalem stone. You’re right there.’ We got it so cheap, you wouldn’t believe it. And the whole damn building is made practically of Jerusalem stone. It’s true. It’s beautiful. So we got it open it for months instead of 20 or 25 years. And we saved at least $1.1 billion and it’s a great embassy right now. It’s a great, great thing. It’s great.”

In fact: The renovations required by Trump’s quick move of the U.S. embassy to an existing U.S. diplomatic facility will cost far more than $400,000. ABC News reported in July: “Documents filed with the official database of federal spending show that the State Department awarded the Maryland-based company Desbuild Limak D&K a contract for $21.2 million to design and build an ‘addition and compound security upgrades’ at the embassy. These updates will be made to the former consular building in Jerusalem — the embassy’s temporary location.” The ABC article continued: “A State Department official told ABC News today that President Trump’s estimates only factored in that first phase of modifications to the former consular building, not this second round of renovation.”

The claim: “It’s incredible what’s happened to the United States, and I’m not just talking about economically, which is tremendous. We’ve created $12 trillion of value since the election, $12 trillion and our primary competitor, very big, powerful competitor (China) has lost $17 trillion since our election. They were catching us. If somebody else were in this position, they would have caught us already, they’re not catching us now, we’re way out in front.”

In fact: There was no apparent basis for Trump’s $17 trillion figure. Trump has sometimes specified that he is talking about losses in the Chinese stock market, but these are nowhere near $17 trillion. George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, said “I can’t really make those numbers add up to anything I’m aware of” and “I don’t think it’s a realistic figure.” Magnus noted that the entire market capitalization of the Shanghai index was just over $5 trillion (U.S.) at the time. “So where the number ‘17’ comes from, I have no idea,” he said. Derek Scissors, an expert on U.S. economic relations with Asia at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, also said a $17 trillion drop in Chinese wealth would be a “catastrophic loss” that is “not in evidence.”

The claim: “They are pushing a $100 trillion government takeover of the U.S. economy, known as the Green New Deal. ‘We’re going to rip down every single building in Manhattan and build a new building in it’s place.’”

In fact: Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal doesn’t require every single building in Manhattan to be torn down. The resolution calls for upgrading, not demolishing, every building in the country: “...Upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

SUNDAY, APRIL 28

Interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo (3 false claims)

The claim: “When — when they used to separate children, which was done during the Obama administration, with Bush, with us, with everybody, far fewer people would come and we’ve been on a humane basis, was pretty bad. We — we go out and we stop the separation. The problem is you have 10 times more people coming up with their families. It’s like Disneyland now. You know, before you’d get separated so people would say let’s not go up. Now you don’t get separated and, you know, while that sounds nice and all, what happens is you have — literally you have 10 times more families coming up because they’re not going to be separated from their children.”

In fact: Family separation was not a known deterrent to migration during the Bush and Obama eras. Families were only separated in rare and exceptional circumstances under presidents prior to Trump, and the subject received minimal if any media coverage; Trump is the one who made it a routine and high-profile policy before reversing course.

The claim: “We’re building a lot of wall. We’re going to have 400 miles of wall up by the end of next year. So the wall is going to be — it’s going to be great.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “We’re the only country in the world that I know of that has a courts system and it’s a — it’s a mobile court system, I mean it is on the border and with all of these cases, 900,000 cases, you need to do 900,000 — you’d need 100,000 lawyers. I mean it’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen.”

In fact: Unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. do not get the right to a trial if they are caught after merely touching U.S. land; in cases where they are caught near the border, they are subject to rapid deportation, known as expedited removal, without seeing a judge. If migrants declare that they are seeking asylum, they do have a right to a legal process — but the U.S. is far from the only country to afford them this right. “This statement is patently false,” James Hathaway, law professor and director of the refugee and asylum law program at the University of Michigan, said in an email in response to a previous version of Trump’s claim. “It is completely routine in other countries that, like the U.S., have signed the UN refugee treaties for asylum-seekers to have access to the domestic legal system to make a protection claim (and to be allowed in while the claim is pending). If anything, the U.S. is aberrational in the opposite direction: U.S. domestic law falsely treats the granting of protection to refugees as a matter of discretion, whereas international law *requires* a grant of protection to anyone who meets the refugee definition. This doesn’t mean that refugees have a right to stay in the U.S. or anywhere else forever — but they *do* have a right to stay for the duration of the persecutory risk, unless another safe country that has also signed the refugee treaties agrees to take them in.”

MONDAY, APRIL 29

Twitter

The claim: “People are fleeing New York State because of high taxes and yes, even oppression of sorts. They didn’t even put up a fight against SALT — could have won. So much litigation.”

In fact: By “SALT,” Trump was referring to a change included in his 2017 tax law that limited deductions for state and local taxes (S-A-L-T) to $10,000. It is not true that New York did not fight the change; leaders of its state government and many of its members of Congress aggressively opposed it. PolitiFact reported: “(Gov. Andrew) Cuomo’s response to the cap goes back to 2017, when it was proposed. Shortly before it became law, he called the SALT cap provision an ‘economic dagger directed at this state’ and ‘a gross injustice.’ In 2018 he launched a campaign against the provision using legal and legislative tools. Cuomo even met with Trump at the White House in February to discuss changes to the cap after Trump indicated he would be open to them. Cuomo has continued to publicly criticize the cap, and following his meeting with Trump, he announced he had enlisted other governors in the effort. ‘As governor of the state of New York today, my top priority is repealing SALT. Period,’ Cuomo told reporters in March.” Democratic New York Rep. Nita Lowey wrote on Twitter: “Is he living under a rock?! We fought tooth and nail against the Republican elimination of the SALT deduction.”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1

Speech at National Day of Prayer dinner

The claim: “On the very top of the tallest structure in our nation’s capital, facing the rising sun each morning, two Latin words are prescribed and inscribed. It’s called praise be to God, very important. And by the way, you’re seeing it more and more. You’re seeing people prouder and prouder. It’s happening. We remember — we remember when we started our campaign. I was saying we’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again. Now everyone’s very proud to be saying Merry Christmas again. There was a time when we went shopping and you wouldn’t see Merry Christmas on the stores. You’d see a red wall and it wouldn’t say that. It would say happy holidays or something, but it wouldn’t say Merry Christmas. We’re back to saying Merry Christmas again in this country, and that something that I consider a great achievement because it really spells out what’s happening.”

In fact: There is no evidence that big department stores and other businesses that said Happy Holidays before Trump’s presidency are now saying Merry Christmas. (Even Trump’s own family members continued to say “Happy Holidays” during Trump’s presidency: daughter and aide Ivanka Trump and son Eric Trump both used that phrase instead of “Merry Christmas” on Twitter in December 2017.)

Interview with Fox Business’s Trish Regan (11 false claims)

The claim: “Well we’re not going to need it, because we have it from other sources, we’re building the wall, and by next year — the end of next year we will have probably around 400 miles of wall up. We’re building a lot of it now, we’ve given out a lot of contracts, we have a lot of contracts that have been left. And we’re building a lot of wall, and unfortunately you know it’s a massive area that we have — that we’re talking about...We’re adding that on to some of the things that we’ve already renovated. And we’ve actually done a lot of work, and we’re doing it — would’ve been a lot easier if we had the money...We’ve cut it down — I’ve actually gotten a better wall for much less money. And we’re getting great speed out of it too. But we have it from different sources, different parts of government, including the military. The Army Corps of engineers has done a really good job, and — [crosstalk]...Yeah it’s being built — it’s being built right now. I mean, as we speak it’s being built, and a lot of it.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “I have the companies coming back in to the United States like you wouldn’t believe. You’ve reported it. I mean Toyota’s coming in with $14 billion, and many of the car companies are going in to Michigan and going in to all of the different — Ohio, and Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida. They’re coming into all of these states, and they’re coming in tremendously. I mean, it’s going to be — it’s incredible what’s happening, we need people, to be honest.”

In fact: Trump was slightly off on Toyota, which announced in March 2019 that it would increase its planned investment to “nearly $13 billion” (it originally said $10 billion in 2017), He was also wrong that car companies are moving into Pennsylvania and Florida. There are no assembly plants in Pennsylvania or Florida at all, noted Bernard Swiecki, director of the Automotive Communities Partnership at the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan, and there are no known plans to bring one to either state.

The claim: “We have a lot of — you know we have a very low unemployment rate. We have the lowest rate we’ve had in 51 years. We’re going to soon set the record.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000, 19 years prior. The rate dropped again in April 2019, to 3.6 per cent, to the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior. We’d obviously let Trump round to “50 years,” but “51 years” is incorrect.

The claim: “Well look at what happened, we just did 3.2 and frankly if we would have had the Obama interest rates — you know, where they kept them very low, which is not necessarily good, but if we would have had those low interest rates we could have been much higher than that. But 3.2 is a number that they haven’t hit in 14 years.”

In fact: Trump’s “haven’t hit in 14 years” is incorrect even if he was only talking about first-quarter growth. The economy grew by 3.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015.

The claim: “And you look at all the Democrats; they all wanted to fire Comey until I fired him. You know Schumer, every one of them — I would say practically every one of them, they wanted him out, and then as soon as I — as soon as he’s gone they were all holier than thou. Oh, that’s such a terrible thing to do. Look, it’s all politics...”

In fact: It is not true that “all the Democrats,” “practically every one of them” or even Schumer in particular wanted Comey fired. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

The claim: Question: “They (Russia) couldn’t get close to you guys.” Trump: “They tried to. I know they probably tried for her campaign too. And if you look at Obama — President Obama in September, he learned a lot about things, he didn’t do anything and nobody likes to talk about it.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he “didn’t do anything.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “Now we’re negotiating with China, we’re negotiating with Japan, we’re negotiating with all of these countries that have just ripped off our country for years, and years...We lose $500 billion with China.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “Now we’re negotiating with China, we’re negotiating with Japan, we’re negotiating with all of these countries that have just ripped off our country for years, and years. We lose $68 billion with Japan.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $58 billion trade deficit with Japan in 2018 and a $57 billion deficit in 2017. It was a $68 billion deficit in 2018 and $69 billion deficit in 2017 if you ignore trade in services and only count trade in goods, but, as always, Trump did not specify that he was doing so.

The claim: “You know, I put tariffs on China. They’re paying us billions and billions of dollars.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “You’re seeing the deals we’re making, including South Korea. We made a great deal with South Korea. That was the deal made by Hillary Clinton. It was a horrible deal. She said it’s going to produce 250,000 jobs, and it did, for South Korea. Not for us, OK, for South Korea.”

In fact: Clinton did not claim that the trade deal with South Korea would “produce 250,000 jobs.” Neither did anyone else in the Obama administration. Obama said that the deal would “support at least 70,000 American jobs.” (It is also probably a stretch to say the deal was “done by Hillary Clinton.” George W. Bush’s administration negotiated the original version of the deal. When Congress refused to ratify it, it was revised by the Obama administration when Clinton was secretary of state.)

The claim: “That’s good. We have — all options are on the table. We’ll see. We want to help people. We’re not interested in anything else, other than helping people. Look, Trish, they’re dying. They’re dying. They’re starving. They have no water; they have nothing. It’s incredible. If you would’ve looked 20 years ago, as you said, if you would’ve looked 25 years ago, this (Venezuela) was one of the wealthiest countries. And now they’re all dying of starvation and things that wouldn’t even believe possible today.”

In fact: Venezuela was not one of the world’s wealthiest countries 20 years ago. The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook put Venezuela 56th in the world in 1999 by GDP per capita — above average, but nowhere near the top. Fifty-fifth was Croatia, 57th was Poland. “Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world 60 years ago. The richest in Latin America 40 years ago. But not 20 years ago,” said Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard University professor of economic development who was chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1994 to 2000 and previously served as Venezuela’s planning minister and a member of the board of the country’s central bank.

Twitter

The claim: “Why didn’t President Obama do something about Russia in September (before November Election) when told by the FBI? He did NOTHING, and had no intention of doing anything!”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he did “NOTHING.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

Twitter

The claim: “Congress must change the Immigration Laws now, Dems won’t act. Wall is being built — 400 miles by end of next year.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

THURSDAY, MAY 2

Interview with Fox News’s Catherine Herridge (7 false claims)

The claim: “I could have stopped all of it. I didn’t do that, and now we win with Mueller, where they come up very strongly with no collusion and no obstruction. No nothing.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “I see where Biden put in a statement, or a strong statement that China is not a big problem. Well, China is a big problem. We’re losing $500 billion a year to China.” And: “Why are we losing 500 billion — for years — $500 billion a year? We — we rebuilt China. They took advantage of us on trade, like nobody in history has ever taken advantage of anyone.” And: “China, right now, we lose $500 billion.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “We have the best unemployment numbers we’ve had in 51 years, soon to be historic.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for March 2019 was 3.8 per cent. That was the lowest since April 2000, 19 years prior. The rate dropped again in April 2019, to 3.6 per cent, to the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior. We’d obviously let Trump round to “50 years,” but “51 years” is incorrect.

The claim: “Well, Comey leaked and he lied. He lied in front to Congress. He was sworn testimony, classified information. I did a terrible job. Everybody wanted him fired — you now everybody; Schumer, every Democrat almost, every Republican almost- probably 100 per cent, but I say almost, just to say it so there’s no mistake. But I read quotes from Schumer and prior to my firing everybody wanted him gone. He did a lousy job. He was a terrible director. Terrible.”

In fact: It is not true that “everybody” or even “almost” everybody, or Schumer in particular, wanted Comey fired. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

The claim: “And what’s happening in Venezuela is sad. When you look at 20 years ago, it’s one of the wealthiest countries in the world, if you think about it...The people are dying. They have nothing. These were people that were living well 20 years ago. Catherine, they have nothing. They don’t have water and food. And they’re dying of hunger right on the border.”

In fact: Venezuela was not one of the world’s wealthiest countries 20 years ago. The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook put Venezuela 56th in the world in 1999 by GDP per capita — above average, but nowhere near the top. Fifty-fifth was Croatia, 57th was Poland. “Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world 60 years ago. The richest in Latin America 40 years ago. But not 20 years ago,” said Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard University professor of economic development who was chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1994 to 2000 and previously served as Venezuela’s planning minister and a member of the board of the country’s central bank.

The claim: “I think so, I think I have been. I think nobody’s done more about Russia than I have. President Obama in September, before the November election...if you look, he was told by the FBI and others, he did nothing about it...Well, he could have done something, I mean, he could have called out the troops and he could have said let’s look at this very closely. He did absolutely nothing, because he thought that crooked Hillary was going to win the election, and she didn’t even come close.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is not true that he “did absolutely nothing.” In October 2016, a month before the election, the administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “China, just, during the Obama years in particular, just took advantage of our country so badly. A very, very big competition, China and, I’ve stopped it. And I am stopping it. You know, during the course of two and a half years, we’ve gone up $17 trillion in value. China has gone down $17 trillion.”

In fact: There was no apparent basis for Trump’s $17 trillion figure. Trump has sometimes specified that he is talking about losses in the Chinese stock market, but these are nowhere near $17 trillion. George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, said “I can’t really make those numbers add up to anything I’m aware of” and “I don’t think it’s a realistic figure.” Magnus noted that the entire market capitalization of the Shanghai index was just over $5 trillion (U.S.) at the time. “So where the number ‘17’ comes from, I have no idea,” he said. Derek Scissors, an expert on U.S. economic relations with Asia at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, also said a $17 trillion drop in Chinese wealth would be a “catastrophic loss” that is “not in evidence.”

Speech at National Day of Prayer event (4 false claims)

The claim: “Thanks also to the many faith leaders from across the country with us today. Special, special people and one of the things I am most proud of is the Johnson Amendment. You can now speak your mind and speak it freely. I said I was going to do that. I told Paula White who I want to thank so much for everything she’s done. Paula. That was one of the things I said. They took away your voice politically and these are the people I want to listen to politically but you weren’t allowed to speak. They would lose their tax-exempt status. That’s not happening anymore so we got rid of the Johnson Amendment. That’s a big thing.”

In fact: Trump has not gotten rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates. His 2017 executive order merely says the Treasury Department will, “to the extent permitted by law,” not impose a tax penalty on a person or religious organization who “speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.” The government almost never imposed such penalties even before the order, and such a directive is far from complete repeal. “Trump’s Religious Liberty Order Doesn’t Answer Most Evangelicals’ Prayers; Prayer breakfast pledge to ‘totally destroy’ Johnson Amendment comes up shy,” read the headline on the website Christianity Today at the time.

The claim: “But when I first started campaigning people were not allowed or in some cases foolishly ashamed to be using on stores Merry Christmas, Happy Christmas. They’d say Happy Holidays. They’d have red walls and you would never see Christmas. That was four years ago. Take a look at your stores nowadays. It’s all Merry Christmas again. Merry Christmas again. They’re proud of it. I always said you are going to be saying Merry Christmas again and that’s what’s happened.”

In fact: There is no evidence that big department stores and other businesses that said Happy Holidays before Trump’s presidency are now saying Merry Christmas. (Even Trump’s own family members continued to say “Happy Holidays” during Trump’s presidency: daughter and aide Ivanka Trump and son Eric Trump both used that phrase instead of “Merry Christmas” on Twitter in December 2017.)

The claim: “Now for the first time, faith-based organizations can serve federal prisoners. They can take care of the people in and they can take care of prisoners as they get out.”

In fact: Faith-based organizations were already allowed to serve prisoners before Trump signed this law, known as the First Step Act; they praised the law for giving them more access, not for giving them access in the first place. James Ackerman, president of Prison Fellowship, said on the organization’s website: “This legislation will increase the access of faith-based and nonprofit organizations, like Prison Fellowship, to provide desperately needed programming in the federal prison system and help reduce recidivism.”

The claim: “And I will say our first lady has taken to this. It’s incredible what she has done. And we’re down 16 per cent with opioids. Sixteen per cent is a lot.”

In fact: There might be some opioid-related statistic that is “down 16 per cent,” there is no indication that there has been a decline that large in any headline statistic, such as the number of overdose deaths. Provisional data from the Centers from Disease Control estimates a 4 per cent decline in overdose deaths between October 2017 and October 2018. We will update this item if additional information emerges.

FRIDAY, MAY 3

Meeting with Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini (3 false claims)

The claim: “We’re taking in billions of dollars from China in the form of tariffs, as you know. We’re charging China tariffs. We’ve never taken in 10 cents from China, and now we’re taking in billions and billions of dollars. That’s had a very positive effect on things. But the deal itself is going along pretty well.”

In fact: It is not even close to true that the U.S. never had even “10 cents” of tariff revenue coming into its treasury from tariffs on China before Trump’s tariffs; FactCheck.org noted that tariffs on China have generated at least $8 billion ever year since 2009. The U.S. had numerous tariffs on China under previous presidents, and Obama imposed high-profile tariffs on Chinese tires, solar panels and steel. (As always: U.S. importers pay these tariffs, not China itself.)

The claim: “Right now, people are starving (in Venezuela). They have no water, they have no food. This is, Mr. Prime Minister, one of the richest countries in the world 20 years ago, and now it’s — they don’t have food and they don’t have water for their people. So we want to help on a humanitarian basis. And I thought it was a very positive conversation I had with President Putin on Venezuela.”

In fact: Venezuela was not one of the world’s wealthiest countries 20 years ago. The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook put Venezuela 56th in the world in 1999 by GDP per capita — above average, but nowhere near the top. Fifty-fifth was Croatia, 57th was Poland. “Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world 60 years ago. The richest in Latin America 40 years ago. But not 20 years ago,” said Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard University professor of economic development who was chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1994 to 2000 and previously served as Venezuela’s planning minister and a member of the board of the country’s central bank.

The claim: “Well, the tariffs have been a necessary thing for me to do because in the case of the European Union, they have not treated us right. We’re losing $181 billion a year.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $110 billion trade deficit with the European Union in 2018 when both goods trade and services trade are included, according to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which uses a different method, the deficit in goods trade alone was $169 billion, still not $180 billion even if Trump had been more specific about what he was discussing.

Twitter

The claim: “There is nothing easy about a USA Infrastructure Plan, especially when our great Country has spent an astounding 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East over the last 19 years...”

In fact: There is no basis for the “$7 trillion” figure. During the 2016 campaign, Trump cited a $6 trillion estimate that appeared to be taken from a 2013 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. (That report estimated $2 trillion in costs up to that point but said the total could rise an additional $4 trillion by 2053.) Trump, however, used the $6 trillion as if it was a current 2016 figure. He later explained that since additional time has elapsed since the campaign, he believes the total is now $7 trillion. That is incorrect. The latest Brown report, issued in November 2018, put the current total at $4.9 trillion, and the current total including estimated future health care obligations at $5.9 trillion.

SATURDAY, MAY 4

Twitter

The claim: “For 10 months, China has been paying Tariffs to the USA of 25% on 50 Billion Dollars of High Tech, and 10% on 200 Billion Dollars of other goods.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

MONDAY, MAY 6

Twitter

The claim: “Also, there are ‘No High Crimes & Misdemeanors,’ No Collusion, No Conspiracy, No Obstruction. ALL THE CRIMES ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE, and that’s what the Dems should be looking at, but they won’t. Nevertheless, the tables are turning!

In fact: At the time Trump tweeted, a single Democrat, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, had been charged with crimes related to Mueller’s work. There was no apparent basis for Trump’s broader claim that “ALL THE CRIMES ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE.” Also, even if Democrats did commit Russia-related crimes, it is certainly not true that “all” the crimes were committed by Democrats: Mueller secured convictions from former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy chairman Rick Gates, former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn; Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty in a case that grew out of Mueller’s work.

Twitter

The claim: “The United States has been losing, for many years, 600 to 800 Billion Dollars a year on Trade. With China we lose 500 Billion Dollars.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

Twitter

The claim: “The United States has been losing, for many years, 600 to 800 Billion Dollars a year on Trade.”

In fact: This is at least a slight exaggeration. The U.S. trade deficit was $621 billion in 2018, so at least within Trump’s range, but it was $566 billion in 2017 and even lower than that in the three preceding years. (Trump habitually ignores trade in services when he talks about trade deficits, choosing the number that refers only to trade in goods. The U.S. had a goods-trade deficit of $810 billion in 2017, $891 billion in 2018.)

Twitter

The claim: “Puerto Rico has been given more money by Congress for Hurricane Disaster Relief, 91 Billion Dollars, than any State in the history of the U.S.”

In fact: Both parts of this two-part claim are wrong: Puerto Rico has not been given $91 billion by Congress; Puerto Rico has not been given more hurricane relief money than any state. As numerous fact-checkers and independent experts have concluded, the $91 billion figure is not how much Puerto Rico has actually been allocated by Congress. Rather, it is an estimate of possible future assistance obligations to Puerto Rico over the course of decades. The month Trump tweeted, the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the amount actually spent on assistance to Puerto Rico was about $11 billion. (Puerto Rico’s Center for a New Economy , described by NBC as “the island’s top research think tank,” put the figure at $12.6 billion.) The Associated Press explained: “The White House has said the ($91 billion) estimate includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion approved. That $50 billion in additional money is speculative. It is based on Puerto Rico’s eligibility for federal emergency disaster funds for years ahead, involving calamities that haven’t happened. That money would require future appropriations by Congress.”” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told FactCheck.org: “It is accurate to say that $41 billion has been allocated and there will likely be billions more. But to just add up actual appropriations (most of which has not actually [been] obligated, much less cash on the ground) to some future cost estimates seems inaccurate to me.” Even if it was $91 billion, that would not be a record, the Associated Press noted: “Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the U.S government more than $120 billion — the bulk of it going to Louisiana.”

Speech to present the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy (3 false claims)

The claim: “And our unemployment numbers are the best in 51 years.”

In fact: The April 2019 unemployment rate was 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior. We’d obviously have let Trump round to 50 years, but “51 years” is inaccurate.

The claim: “And our unemployment numbers are the best in 51 years. And for certain groups — African-American, Asian-American. Women is now 71 years.”

In fact: The April 2019 unemployment rate for women was 3.4 per cent, lowest since September 1953 — between 65 and 66 years prior, not “71 years.”

The claim: “We’re taking care of our veterans like never before. We just approved, after 44 years — they’ve been trying to get it — Veterans Choice. Rather than waiting for days and weeks and months to see a doctor, if there’s a wait, you go right outside; you get to a local doctor, who is a great doctor; we pay the bill and you get yourself fixed up. They’ve been trying to get that, Mark, for 44 years, as you know. And plenty of other things have been passed for our great veterans.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8

Campaign rally in Panama City Beach, Florida (30 false claims)

The claim: “And by the way FEMA. My people at FEMA. FEMA did a tremendous job here and elsewhere, by the way. They had this, they had Texas. They had Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico got $91 billion, and I understand they don’t like me. It’s the most money we’ve ever given to any — anybody. We’ve never given $91 billion to a state, we’ve never given — we gave to Puerto Rico $91 billion and I’ll tell you, the services, you look at the Marines, you look at the Navy, the job they did there was really incredible, incredible, incredible....I say, ‘You know what, I have a great relationship with the people of Puerto Rico, but it hasn’t been fair the way they’ve treated all of us from the standpoint of their leaders because they complain they want more money. You got $91 billion, it’s the largest amount of money ever given for a hurricane to a state, to any element, and that’s the way it is, but you’re getting your money one way or the other and we’re not going to let anybody hold it up. And I think that the people of Puerto Rico are very grateful to Donald Trump for what we’ve done for them.”

In fact: As numerous fact-checkers and independent experts have concluded, it is not true that “Puerto Rico got $91 billion”; that figure was an estimate of possible future assistance obligations to Puerto Rico over the course of decades, not actual current spending. The month Trump spoke, the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the amount actually spent on assistance to Puerto Rico was about $11 billion. (Puerto Rico’s Center for a New Economy , described by NBC as “the island’s top research think tank,” put the figure at $12.6 billion.) The Associated Press explained: “The White House has said the ($91 billion) estimate includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion approved. That $50 billion in additional money is speculative. It is based on Puerto Rico’s eligibility for federal emergency disaster funds for years ahead, involving calamities that haven’t happened. That money would require future appropriations by Congress.”” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told FactCheck.org: “It is accurate to say that $41 billion has been allocated and there will likely be billions more. But to just add up actual appropriations (most of which has not actually [been] obligated, much less cash on the ground) to some future cost estimates seems inaccurate to me.” Even if it was $91 billion, that would not be a record, the Associated Press noted: “Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the U.S government more than $120 billion — the bulk of it going to Louisiana.”

The claim: “Hispanic-American unemployment just hit another brand new all-time historic low. African-American unemployment recently achieved the lowest rate in the history of our country, and likewise Hispanic-American unemployment lowest in the history of our country. I’m going to like that on the debate stage, you’ll be hearing me laughter, I’ll say, ‘The lowest rates ever in history, highest income ever in history for the different groups, highest income.’”

In fact: Trump was right about the unemployment rates but partially wrong about income. As the Associated Press noted, African-American incoem was not at an all-time high: “The median income last year for a black household was $40,258, according to the Census Bureau. That’s below a 2000 peak of $42,348 and also statistically no better than 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year in office.”

The claim: “I said, ‘Who is that woman that was so great up in the state of Michigan?’ Because we won that state we weren’t expected to, but you know we left. That was the last speech I made and we have 32,000 people show up at 1 o’clock in the morning, which is now Election Day. Think of that. And I left — think of it, Election Day, and I left, and I said, ‘You know, I don’t know why we’re going to lose.’ We had 32,000, our opponent — we want to be nice, our opponent was there at primetime, like 6 o’clock, and she had 500 people. I said, ‘Why are we going to lose Michigan?’ And you know, what we didn’t, because Ronna McDaniel was fantastic.’”

In fact: Trump did not have a crowd of 32,000 people in Michigan on the eve of the 2016 election. The capacity of his venue in Grand Rapids was 4,200. Local newspapers reported that the room was over capacity, and that there was a large crowd outside, but the total was nowhere near 32,000. Nick LaFave, a news anchor for WZZM 13 television in Grand Rapids, wrote on Twitter: “I covered that rally. The place was definitely beyond capacity. I think we estimated 8k. Many more outside who never got in. But, no way that got to 32k. None. No way.”

The claim: “I said, ‘Who is that woman that was so great up in the state of Michigan?’ Because we won that state we weren’t expected to, but you know we left. That was the last speech I made and we have 32,000 people show up at 1 o’clock in the morning, which is now Election Day. Think of that. And I left — think of it, Election Day, and I left, and I said, ‘You know, I don’t know why we’re going to lose.’ We had 32,000, our opponent — we want to be nice, our opponent was there at primetime, like 6 o’clock, and she had 500 people. I said, ‘Why are we going to lose Michigan?’ And you know, what we didn’t, because Ronna McDaniel was fantastic.’”

In fact: Clinton had a capacity crowd of 4,600 at her rally at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University the day before the election, not “500 people.”

The claim: “Unemployment just reached the lowest rate in more than 50 years.”

In fact: “Fifty years” would be almost exactly accurate as a rounded estimate, but “more than 50 years” is incorrect. The April 2019 unemployment rate was an excellent 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “To keep your family farms and ranches and small businesses in the family, they don’t talk about this. We eliminated the unfair estate tax or death tax. So now if you love your child or you love your children and you have a beautiful farm, ranch, small business, it’s doing great. You know the old days meeting like about two years ago, they had to go out, borrow money from a bank, lose their business in many cases. Now you don’t have a tax, you don’t have a tax. So if you love them, good. If you don’t love them, I would leave it to them, and it’s not going to matter. It won’t help you much. But if you love your family, that’s what’s going to happen.”

In fact: Trump has not “eliminated” the estate tax: his tax law merely raised the threshold at which the tax must be paid. Also, it is highly misleading to suggest that the estate tax was a major burden on family farms and small businesses: very few of them were paying the tax even before Trump’s tax law was passed. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses were among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017, before Trump’s tax law. The Center wrote on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 of the total estate tax revenue.”

The claim: “It’s another thing if we’re dealing with countries that are loaded with cash, make a fortune, and we’re defending them for a tiny fraction of what it costs. It’s ridiculous. So it’s all changing, lot of changes. One country, I won’t say the country, but one country we spend a lot of money defending. Very dangerous territory and it costs us $5 billion, and I said to a general, ‘Please do me a favor, General. Tell me how much is it cost for us to defend this country, which is very rich?’ ‘Sir, I will check.’ He comes in, ‘Sir, it’s $5 billion, sir.’ I said, ‘That’s okay. Now, how much do they pay us?’ ‘Sir, they pay us $500 million.’ I say, ‘We lose $4.5 billion to defend a country that’s rich as hell and probably doesn’t like us too much.’ Can you believe that? And we’ve been defending it for many years. So I call the leader of the country. I said, ‘You know it’s not fair. We’re spending all of this money, great danger, and we have our men and women, they’re the best in the world and we’re sending them over to your country, not fair. You got to pay, you’ve got to pay.’ And he said, like the king, he said, ‘But nobody’s ever asked us that before.’ I said, ‘That’s because you had stupid people.’ So they said — they said...He said that we can’t do anything now because it passed our so-called Parliament, and so we can’t, it doesn’t come due? ‘When’s next year?’ He said ‘Two months.’ I said, ‘All right, pay me something now. How much will you pay?’’We can’t pay you more than $500 million.’ I got to say there’s one phone call, right? They said, ‘Make it 750.’ Now that’s a long way short of four and a half billion that we’re losing, but I should make it 750. Anyway, we agreed to a number around $500 million. It was one phone call that lasted for 10 minutes and once they got over the shock of being — they have plenty of money. And now the two months is up, and I just told my people call them and ask for the rest of it, OK? But we have many countries like that, I mean, we have many countries like that.”

In fact: Trump did not name the country — but he was clearly referring to South Korea, since this was the story he previously told about securing additional money from that country. However, his figures were wrong. South Korea previously paid about $850 million per year for the U.S. troop presence in the country; after Trump pressure, South Korea agreed to a one-year deal in which it would pay about $925 million — an increase of less than $100 million, not $500 million. The New York Times reported upon a previous version of this Trump claim: “South Koreans were left flustered on Wednesday after President Trump asserted that he had made their government pay $500 million more to help cover the cost of maintaining American troops in the country. The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal South Korea and the United States signed on Sunday after months of contentious negotiations. Under the one-year deal, this year South Korea will pay 1.04 trillion won, or $925 million, an increase of $70 million from last year’s $855 million.”

The claim: “We have countries like Saudi Arabia, very rich, nothing but cash, right. So I think they can afford to pay us, right, for defense, and they will, and you know what, they will. And they’re buying a tremendous amount of equipment, $450 billion they’ll be spending in our country. Four hundred and fifty billion.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that Saudi Arabia has agreed to make $450 billion in purchases from the U.S. The White House has never explained what Trump is talking about; PolitiFact reported: “Hossein Askari, a business professor at George Washington University, analyzes international trade in the Middle East. He knows of no tally of contracts to back up Trump’s assertion. ‘There is absolutely no such number that could support the $450 billion,’ Askari said.” Trump had previously claimed that Saudi Arabia was making $110 billion in military orders, which also appeared baseless; the Associated Press wrote: “Trump’s wrong to suggest that he has $110 billion in military orders from Saudi Arabia. A far smaller amount in sales has actually been signed...Details of the $110 billion arms package, partly negotiated under the Obama administration and agreed upon in May 2017, have been sketchy. At the time the Trump administration provided only a broad description of the defense equipment that would be sold. There was no public breakdown of exactly what was being offered for sale and for how much...The Pentagon said this month that Saudi Arabia has signed ‘letters of offer and acceptance’ for only $14.5 billion in sales, including helicopters, tanks, ships, weapons and training. Those letters, issued after the U.S. government has approved a proposed sale, specify its terms...Trump’s repeated claims that he’s signed $110 billion worth of new arms sales to Riyadh are ‘just not true,’ said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former CIA and Defense Department official.”

The claim: “I went to Texas and I made a speech and Beto, Beto. Why has he fallen like a rock? What the hell happened to Beto? So we went to El Paso and I made a speech and we had an arena that holds 8 or 9,000 people, the arena was packed. We had 35,000 people outside we had these massive movie screens outside, so those people that couldn’t get in could see. He had 502 people. The next day in the news, the New York Times guy, actually wrote a story that he thinks that he had more people than me. Can you believe this? No, no. Can you believe? So dishonest. And most of them just said, ‘Two massive crowds.’ Well, his crowd was not massive. He had like 502 people according to the people that count crowds.”

In fact: The New York Times did not write a story saying that O’Rourke had a larger crowd than Trump when they held events in El Paso, Texas on the same night in February. The Times’s main news story did not discuss crowd sizes in any detail, while a “Critic’s Notebook” analysis by the paper’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, discussed Trump’s fixation on crowd sizes, and dishonesty about them, but did not render a verdict, saying, “I will leave it to others to adjudicate whose was bigger. But the night was an example of how nothing threatens this TV president more than a challenge to his ratings.”

The claim: “I went to Texas and I made a speech and Beto, Beto. Why has he fallen like a rock? What the hell happened to Beto? So we went to El Paso and I made a speech and we had an arena that holds 8 or 9,000 people, the arena was packed. We had 35,000 people outside we had these massive movie screens outside, so those people that couldn’t get in could see. He had 502 people. The next day in the news, the New York Times guy, actually wrote a story that he thinks that he had more people than me. Can you believe this? No, no. Can you believe? So dishonest.”

In fact: Beto O’Rourke obviously drew more than “502 people” to his event; Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg reported at the time: “El Paso police estimate a crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 for the anti-Trump, anti-wall, pro-O’Rourke march and rally tonight.” The Texas Tribune reported that “about 7,000 people went to see O’Rourke speak at the park (after the march), according to an aide, who cited law enforcement.” Also, there were not “35,000 people” outside Trump’s rally. El Paso’s fire department issued a rough estimate of up to 3,500, though it said it did not closely track the number outside; local journalist Bob Moore tweeted, “El Paso County Coliseum officials tell me about 6,000 people watched the @realDonaldTrump rally on screens outside, on top of the 7,000 inside.”

The claim: “The last administration also signed a disastrous trade deal with South Korea that cost our country nearly 100,000 jobs but it was really 250,000 jobs. And if you remember, our secretary of state at the time and our President at the time said, ‘This will give 250,000 jobs,’ and he and she were right, except it was for South Korea, not for us.”

In fact: Obama and Clinton, his secretary of state, did not say the U.S. trade deal with South Korea would produce 250,000 jobs.Obama said that the deal would “support at least 70,000 American jobs.”

The claim: “But the big announcement is in Lordstown, Ohio, they’re going to be selling that plant to Workhorse, it’s called — they make electric trucks because the enemy...They kept telling me with Lordstown, because General Motors closed it while they did the right thing, they sold it to a company. That’s going to do a great job with that beautiful plant, and that happened just a little while ago, just a little while ago. They’ll be spending a lot of money on fixing it up. It’s subject to the UAW. They’ve got to get out there make a deal. UAW, come on, got to make a deal. But that’s a great thing, right? Because that was the only thing they could hit me with. They couldn’t have been happy with anything, because we’ve been so good, but this is — what about Lordstown? What about Lordstown? I call up Mary Barra, ‘Will you make a deal or open it, please. I’m getting killed with that plant.’ Anyway, today she called, they’re going to be opening, it’s going to be a great company going there, it is really wonderful. And another historic action.”

In fact: “Going to be selling it” can be considered a fair prediction, but “they sold it to a company” is inaccurate. GM had not yet sold the Lordstown plant. “GM is in discussions to sell the Lordstown complex to Workhorse. The deal is not done,” GM spokesperson Dan Flores told us.

The claim: “Democrats believe that everyone in the world has the right to violate our borders. They want open borders, disrespect our laws, and come into our country and collect benefits, courtesy of the United States taxpayers.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Without the wall nothing works, folks. You know that. So we’re going to have over 400 miles of wall built, it’s already — much of it’s already started. By the end of next year — and we’ll conclude it pretty shortly thereafter. We’ll have the whole thing sealed up and it’ll be a lot easier.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “The other one is visa lottery, it’s a lottery. Who is coming to the United States. So these countries put people in a basket like little — who is it? Who is it? Let’s see. Well, that’s beautiful. This isn’t like a stone cold killer. Yes, thank you. Tell me, if the United States is accepting people under a lottery system, compliments of Chuck Schumer. If they’re accepting people under a lottery system, do you actually think that the country is giving us their finest? No, no. They are giving us some rough people. I won’t say it.”

In fact: This is, as usual, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s claim that foreign countries “put” unwanted citizens into the U.S. lottery, would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will, because they want to immigrate. The people whose names are picked are subjected to an extensive background check.

The claim: “And I told Mexico, very nicely, that you can’t let people walk 2,000 miles up your country, because if we do that we’re going to close our border, if we have any more, we’re going to close the border. I don’t care what it’ll be. We’ll close our border. So Mexico now, for the first time, has been taking people back to Honduras and Guatemala, and El Salvador, and other countries, and for the first time, not big enough numbers but they’re getting bigger, they’re getting bigger.”

In fact: As the Washington Post noted, this was not the first time Mexico had apprehended migrants: “Mexico has deported Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans more than 2 million times since 2001.”

The claim: “I’ll be honest. Mexico made $100 billion on average over the last 10 years, a hundred billion.”

In fact: Mexico has never once had a trade surplus of over $100 billion with the U.S. According to U.S. government data, the surplus was $69 billion in 2017, $78 billion in 2018.

The claim: “Our current immigration crisis is the result of Democrat backed policies that prevent border crossers from being swiftly returned home. A border crossing comes in, you say, ‘Sorry, we’re taking you home.’ And that’s if you’re nice, and I want to do that. OK? But we’re the only one that has judges, judges, think of it. They come across, we have judges with the honor, and nobody else has judges. We give them a trial, we need Perry Mason, it’s crazy. Folks, it’s crazy.”

In fact: While no country has a system precisely like the American one, it is not true that the U.S. is the only country that gives asylum seekers the right to a legal hearing. James Hathaway, law professor and director of the refugee and asylum law program at the University of Michigan, said in an email in response to a previous version of Trump’s claim: “It is completely routine in other countries that, like the U.S., have signed the UN refugee treaties for asylum-seekers to have access to the domestic legal system to make a protection claim (and to be allowed in while the claim is pending). If anything, the U.S. is aberrational in the opposite direction: U.S. domestic law falsely treats the granting of protection to refugees as a matter of discretion, whereas international law *requires* a grant of protection to anyone who meets the refugee definition. This doesn’t mean that refugees have a right to stay in the U.S. or anywhere else forever — but they *do* have a right to stay for the duration of the persecutory risk, unless another safe country that has also signed the refugee treaties agrees to take them in.”

The claim: “We must end catch and release. Stop human smugglers. Have you seen what’s happening? Human smugglers, human traffickers. Have you seen what they’re doing? This is an ancient thing. It’s an ancient crime. It’s bigger now because of the computer because of the Internet than ever before worldwide, not just here, worldwide, and most come through our southern border where we don’t have a wall. They don’t go through ports of entry. You have people looking inside the car or the van. So you can’t do that. If you have women tied up with tape over their mouths, you can’t take them through a port of entry. And a lot of these people say, “Oh they come through the port,’ they don’t come through the port. They come through areas where you don’t have the wall. Fifteen miles up and make a left.”

In fact: Experts say many human trafficking victims do enter the U.S. through legal ports of entry, on visas, after being deceived into thinking they are coming to a good job or loving relationship in the U.S. “It is far easier to lure victims with false promises of a better life in the United States,” said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center. “Why kidnap someone when you can convince them to travel willingly?” FactCheck.org reported: “The United Nations’ International Organization on Migration has found that ‘nearly 80% of international human trafficking journeys cross through official border points, such as airports and land border control points,’ based on 10 years’ worth of cases on which the IOM has assisted.”

The claim: “And then you have this governor in Virginia, you saw that. The baby is born and you wrap the baby beautifully and you talk to the mother about the possible execution of the baby.”

In fact: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam did not say that; his comments were far less clear and more nuanced. He told a radio station: “You know when we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician by the way. And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labour, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.” The comments prompted an uproar from pro-life conservatives, who accused him of endorsing infanticide. Northam’s spokesperson, however, said he was speaking only about the rare cases where a woman with a non-viable pregnancy goes into labour. Regardless, Northam clearly did not say he would execute a baby.

The claim: “Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, witch hunts, and delusions.”

In fact: We’ll ignore the rest of this statement as political rhetoric, but the Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “I wish the cameras — would you please show these people? I go home, you know, you hear it. You hear it. You can hear how many people, but they never show it. They don’t want to do it.”

In fact: Media outlets regularly show images of Trump’s crowds, often while he is complaining that they never show his crowds.

The claim: “We’ve launched a historic initiative to reduce the price of prescription drugs, we’re doing big. Last year prescription drug prices went down for the first time in nearly 51 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “And we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Always. The Republican Party will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.”

In fact: This claim is belied by Republicans’ actions. The party tried repeatedly during Trump’s early presidency to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, Trump’s administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

The claim: “And for the veterans, we passed VA Choice. So right now as they wait in line for two weeks, three weeks, 10 days, four days, two months, people that weren’t even very sick or terminally ill, before they get to see a doctor, they immediately go outside, find a good local doctor, get themselves fixed up and we paid the bill, and it’s a great thing for our veterans. They’ve been trying to get it passed for 44 years. We got it passed.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “And we also passed — 46 years they’ve been trying — VA Accountability, because under the VA you couldn’t fire anybody. If they were terrible to our great vets, they could be sadistic, they could steal, they could rob, they could do anything. We had no way of firing these people. Now we passed VA Accountability. They don’t treat our vets right, boom, you’re fired. Forty-six years they tried to get that.”

In fact: As FactCheck.org reported: “It was possible for VA employees to be fired before Trump signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act in June 2017. That law does make it easier for the VA secretary to remove employees by shortening the firing process and expediting the appeals process for senior executives, among other things. But the VA was already terminating about 2,300 employees (for performance and disciplinary reasons) each fiscal year on average before Trump’s presidency going back to 2005.”

The claim: “The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.”

In fact: The “now” is so misleading that we’re calling this claim false. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “We were insisting that no NATO members — you had to see this, the NATO folks they don’t pay their fair share. They were supposed to pay. We were taking over and spending almost 100 per cent of our money to protect the countries in NATO, which is Europe, and I said, that’s not right.”

In fact: This was an even more egregious false claim than Trump’s usual. Trump usually claims that the U.S. is responsible for about 100 per cent of NATO spending, which itself is not true; in 2017, according to an official NATO report, U.S. defence spending represented about 72 per cent of the alliance’s total. Here, Trump said the U.S. was “spending almost 100 per cent of our money to protect the countries in NATO,” which is completely nonsensical.

The claim: “On top of that, the EU absolutely kills us. So it’s all changing, folks. One hundred billion dollars extra was just given by those countries that’s now pouring into NATO because they said you got to pay up. your past presidents would go and meet them and wouldn’t talk about it or they’d say, ‘Gee, whenever you get a chance, maybe you could pay up.’ You had to see. It was like a chart this way (down), now it’s a chart like a rocket ship the other one. They’re paying up — $100 million. Hundred billion with a B.”

In fact: Trump’s predecessors were frequently more forceful than he claimed in attempting to pressure allies to spend more on defence, but we won’t count this claim as false. What we will count: his claim that the chart of defence spending by NATO members was a simple chart downward before he took office. Spending by non-U.S. members rose by 1.84 per cent in 2015 and 3.08 per cent in 2016, official NATO figures show. (It is unclear how much of the Trump-era increase is a result of Trump’s hectoring of NATO leaders and how much is because of pre-planned increases.)

The claim: “...and just two weeks ago I announced that the United States would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. That’s a big deal.”

In fact: Trump announced this decision in March 2019, more than six weeks prior to this speech, not “just two weeks ago.” Trump regularly moves news he is touting closer to the present.

Twitter

The claim: “Getting ready to leave for one of my favorite places, the Florida Panhandle, where we’ve given, and are giving, billions of $$$ for the devastation caused by Hurricane Michael. Even though the Dems are totally in our way (they don’t want money to go there) we’re getting it done!”

In fact: As PolitiFact Florida explained, there was no basis for the claim that Democrats did not want disaster relief money to go to Florida or the Florida Panhandle: “Lawmakers in both parties support disaster aid, including for Florida, but the partisan battle has been over how much to give Puerto Rico...His swipe appears to a reference to the Senate Democrats’ April 1 vote against a GOP version of disaster aid, because Democrats wanted more money for Puerto Rico. But Trump omits that Senate Democrats voted in favor of their own version that included money for Florida and other areas hit by disasters. Also, the Democratic-led House passed a bill months ago.”

Twitter

The claim: “The reason for the China pullback & attempted renegotiation of the Trade Deal is the sincere HOPE that they will be able to ‘negotiate’ with Joe Biden or one of the very weak Democrats, and thereby continue to ripoff the United States (($500 Billion a year)) for years to come....”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

THURSDAY, MAY 9

Speech on medical billing practices (19 false claims)

The claim: “The Republican Party will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.”

In fact: This claim is belied by Republicans’ actions. The party tried repeatedly during Trump’s early presidency to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, Trump’s administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

The claim: “But I don’t think they’re ready to negotiate because we have to either do it — it’s very much like China. The Vice Premier is coming here today. We were getting very close to a deal, and then they started to renegotiate the deal. We can’t have that. We can’t have that. So our country can take in $120 billion a year in tariffs, paid for mostly by China, by the way, not by us. A lot of people try and steer it in a different direction. It’s really paid — ultimately, it’s paid for by — largely, by China.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “But a large group delegation, headed by one of the most respected men and highest officials of China, will be coming in today. They start at 5 o’clock. And they’ll see what they can do. But our alternative is an excellent one. It’s an alternative I’ve spoken about for years. We’ll take in well over $100 billion a year. We never took in 10 cents from China. Not 10 cents.”

In fact: It is not even close to true that the U.S. never had even “10 cents” of tariff revenue coming into its treasury from tariffs on China before Trump’s tariffs; FactCheck.org noted that tariffs on China have generated at least $8 billion ever year since 2009. The U.S. had numerous tariffs on China under previous presidents, and Obama imposed high-profile tariffs on Chinese tires, solar panels and steel. (As always: U.S. importers pay these tariffs, not China itself.)

The claim: “Our unemployment numbers are the best in the history of our country and we’re doing well.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for April 2019 was 3.6 per cent. That was the best in more than 49 years, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “And our companies are really doing well. Even in Ohio — the great state of Ohio — yesterday, General Motors, at my very strong urging, to put it mildly, very strong urging. I wasn’t even nice about it. But I appreciate what they did. They sold the beautiful plant — Lordstown. They sold that beautiful plant to a very, very good company that going to make electric trucks. And that work — because that was the only thing they could say about our whole economy. Lordstown. They kept saying, ‘Lordstown. Lordstown.’ And when you had all of these great companies spending billions and billions of dollars coming into our country — they couldn’t talk about it — they’d only mention the one plant that was a GM plant from a very long time ago. And now we have a great company going in. Going to make electric trucks.”

In fact: GM had not yet sold the Lordstown plant. “GM is in discussions to sell the Lordstown complex to Workhorse. The deal is not done,” GM spokesperson Dan Flores told us.

The claim: “And Bob Mueller is no friend of mine. I had conflicts with him. We had a business dispute. We had somebody that is in love with James Comey. He liked James Comey. They were very good friends; supposedly, best friends. Maybe not, but supposedly, best friends. You look at the picture file and you see hundreds of pictures of him and Comey.”

In fact: There is no evidence, including from “the picture file,” that the two former FBI directors are “best friends.” (Trump previously made a false claim that “I could give you 100 pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other”; zero such photos have been provided or unearthed.) Though they do know and like each other, and though it is fair for Trump to argue that it was inappropriate for Mueller to conduct an investigation involving Comey, nobody has produced any kind of proof that they were more than professional associates when both were at the FBI. Comey’s lawyer has said: “Jim and Bob are friends in the sense that co-workers are friends. They don’t really have a personal relationship. Jim has never been to Bob’s house and Bob has never been to Jim’s house.”

The claim: “And then, he puts on his staff — almost all Democrats, many of whom contributed to Hillary Clinton. None of them contributed to me, that I can tell you. And it started out at 13 and went to 18. And these were angry Democrats. These were people that went to her — in one case, went to her — it was supposed to be a party; it turned out to be a funeral on election evening. And was going wild he was so angry. And this man now is judging me. You had other people made big contributions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They were angry Democrats in, I think, almost all cases. One of the people worked on the Clinton Foundation as — just about the top person at the Clinton Foundation.”

In fact: The Robert Mueller investigation was, of course, run by a Republican, Mueller himself. We’ll ignore Trump’s characterization of the others on the team as “angry Democrats,” but it is false that the lawyer who was connected to the Clinton Foundation, Jeannie Rhee, was “one of the top people at the Clinton Foundation.” Rhee represented the Clinton Foundation, as an outside counsel, in its defence against a 2015 lawsuit. She was not involved in the management of the foundation.

The claim: “That’s what people want to know. And I won’t tell you, I had an event last night; a lot of you were there. Thousands and thousands of people standing in a field. They’ve never seen anything like it — meaning, even the press. But it’s always that way. We’ve never had an empty seat.”

In fact: There have been empty seats at multiple Trump rallies. Regarding an October 2018 rally in Texas on behalf of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Dallas News reported: “Many hundreds of seats were empty, including all of the boxes on both tiers of the mezzanine.” When Trump had a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in April 2017, Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Jonathan Tamari tweeted a photo of rows of empty seats in the upper deck; he wrote, “Trump says ‘we have a lot of ppl standing outside’ and he ‘broke the all time record’ in this arena. There are rows of empty seats here.” Reporting on Trump’s May 2018 rally in Nashville, the Tennessean newspaper reported that Trump was “speaking to a crowd of thousands at Municipal Auditorium, which also had hundreds of empty seats.” In April 2016, the Associated Press reported, “Donald Trump’s final rally on the eve of Wisconsin’s primary attracted a smaller than usual crowd, with several hundred seats still empty as he stepped on stage.”

The claim: “What I’d like to see with Iran, I’d like to see them call me. You know, John Kerry speaks to them a lot. John Kerry tells them not to call. That’s a violation of the Logan Act. And, frankly, he should be prosecuted on that. But my people don’t want to do anything that’s — only the Democrats do that kind of stuff, you know? If it were the opposite way, they’d prosecute him under the Logan Act. But John Kerry violated the Logan Act. He’s talking to Iran and has been. Has many meetings and many phone calls, and he’s telling them what to do. That is a total violation of the Logan Act...We’re not looking to hurt Iran. I want them to be strong and great and have a great economy. But they’re listening to John Kerry, who’s violated a very important element of what he’s supposed to be doing. He violated the Logan Act. Plain and simple. He shouldn’t be doing that.”

In fact: There is no evidence that Kerry, the former secretary of state, “speaks to them a lot” or “tells them not to call”; we will update this item if Trump or anyone else provides any evidence of recent conversations. Sources close to Kerry told media outlets that Kerry last spoke to Iranian officials a year prior, before Trump’s May 2018 decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement. CNN reported: “Matt Summers, a spokesman for Kerry, said in a statement that Trump’s claim ‘is simply wrong, end of story.’ ‘He’s wrong about the facts, wrong about the law, and sadly he’s been wrong about how to use diplomacy to keep America safe.’ A source close to the former secretary of state said Kerry hasn’t talked with Iranian officials since President Trump announced the US was pulling out of the Iran deal last year. Prior to the withdrawal, the source said Kerry did communicate with the Iranians to urge them to stay in the deal. The source also denied that Kerry ever discouraged the Iranians from talking to Trump. At the time, the source said, Kerry urged everyone on all sides to talk and use diplomacy.”

The claim: “I have presidential privilege. I could’ve stopped everything. I didn’t have to give them a document. I gave them 1.5 million documents. I gave them White House Counsel. I gave them other lawyers. Anybody you want, you can talk to.”

In fact: Trump himself refused to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.

The claim: “Because what they should be doing is their economy is a mess ever since I took away the Iran deal. They have inflation that’s the highest number I’ve ever heard. They’re having riots every weekend and during the week, even.”

In fact: Iran is not having “riots every weekend.” Hussein Banai, a professor who studies Iran at the international studies school at Indiana University, said in an email: “While there have been sporadic small-group protests here and there (once every 3-6 months) in response to very specific issues (municipal corruption, university policies, abuse of power, etc.), there’s been nothing remotely close to weekly demonstrations, let alone ‘riots’!”

The claim: “You know, we’re the piggy bank that everybody steals from, including China. We’ve been paying China $500 billion a year for many, many years.” And: “And I like the president a lot; he’s a friend of mine. But I’m representing the USA, and he’s representing China. And we’re not going to be taken advantage of anymore. We’re not going to pay China $500 billion a year.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “What I’m doing now with China should’ve happened many years ago. Not just Obama; long before Obama. I always say — you know, if you look, NAFTA is one of the first deals ever made — trade deal. But the worst trade deal ever made is the WTO, because China was flatlining for many, many decades. Many, many — it was flat, right here. The WTO came along. We allowed China into the WTO, and they became a rocket ship. You got to take a look at a chart sometime. Do it. It’ll be very interesting. An economic chart.”

In fact: While China’s entry into the WTO at the end of 2001 does appear to have helped its economy, it is not true that China’s growth was stagnant (”flatlining”) for decades before its entry: its GDP growth rates for 1992, 1993 and 1994, for example, were all higher than its growth rates for 2002, 2003 and 2004, the years following its admittance to the WTO. As Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics wrote in 2008: “China has been the fastest growing economy in the world over almost three decades, expanding at 10 per cent per year in real terms.”

The claim: “And I like the president a lot; he’s a friend of mine. But I’m representing the USA, and he’s representing China. And we’re not going to be taken advantage of anymore...So we put very heavy tariffs on China, as of Friday, and we put them on, also, eight months ago. And when people looked at the economic numbers, they were shocked. When they looked at the import/export numbers, they were shocked. They said, ‘Wow, how did they get to this point? This was very good. That was a very good report.’ They’d never seen that for many years. I said, ‘Try looking at all of the tariffs that China has been paying us for the last eight months.’ Billions and billions of dollars. And that’s only because I gave them a break — because we were negotiating good will.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “They’ve taken advantage of us on military. We defend all these countries for nothing, or for a tiny fraction of what it costs. We take care of NATO. I’m all of for NATO. I’m all for NATO. And I think it’s just wonderful, but it’s different than it was 25 years ago and 40 years ago. And I got NATO to put up an extra hundred billion dollars. Ask Secretary General Stoltenberg. He’s like Donald Trump’s biggest fan. Because spending was going down. The contributions that the 28 countries were making, it was heading like a slope down, like a very steep mountain. And then I came, and it went up.”

In fact: Defence spending by NATO members was not “going down” at all, let alone “like a very steep mountain,” before Trump took office. It rose by 1.84 per cent in 2015 and 3.08 per cent in 2016, official NATO figures show. (It is unclear how much of the Trump-era increase is a result of Trump’s hectoring of NATO leaders and how much is because of pre-planned increases.)

The claim: “We pay for — anywhere from 70 to 100 per cent of NATO. So we protect NATO. We protect European countries. And we protect them, and we protect them beautifully. We’re the power. We’re the most powerful nation, especially since we’ve redone our military, redoing and done all of the nuclear. You never want to use it but you have to have it.”

In fact: The “70” per cent is about right, but the “to 100” is not. According to NATO’s 2018 annual report, U.S. defence spending — on everything, not just protecting Europe — represented 72 per cent of alliance members’ total defence spending in 2017. Of NATO’s own organizational budget, the U.S. contributes a much smaller agreed-upon percentage: 22 per cent.

The claim: “They could very easily — I told the story last night: I picked up $500 million with one phone call to a country. And that’s just the beginning. And I’ve done it with many other countries. Anyway, but just over the last very short period of time — one phone call that lasted for a period of, I would say, five minutes, I picked up $500 million because I said, “You’re not taking care of us. We’re taking care of you, but you’re not taking care. It’s not fair.’”

In fact: Trump did not name the country — but he was clearly referring to South Korea, since this was almost precisely the story he has previously told about securing additional money from South Korea. However, his figures were wrong. South Korea previously paid about $850 million per year for the U.S. troop presence in the country; after Trump pressure, South Korea agreed to a one-year deal in which it would pay about $925 million — an increase of less than $100 million, not $500 million. The New York Times reported upon a previous version of this Trump claim: “South Koreans were left flustered on Wednesday after President Trump asserted that he had made their government pay $500 million more to help cover the cost of maintaining American troops in the country. The claim contradicted the terms of a cost-sharing deal South Korea and the United States signed on Sunday after months of contentious negotiations. Under the one-year deal, this year South Korea will pay 1.04 trillion won, or $925 million, an increase of $70 million from last year’s $855 million.”

The claim: “And I told President Xi of China, and I tell Abe, who is a good friend of mine — prime minister of Japan. Doing a great job. I tell him, I tell everybody — I say, ‘I don’t blame you. I blame the people that ran the United States, and I blame their trade representatives. And frankly, I blame our presidents. Because this should have never happened.’ We’ve been losing, for years, close to $800 billion — not million — $800 million is a lot, but we’ve been losing $800 billion on trade. Eight hundred billion dollars. We’re going to stop that. And we’ve already started.”

In fact: The U.S. trade deficit was $621 billion in 2018 and $566 billion in 2017, and it had never previously been $800 billion for a year. (Trump habitually ignores trade in services when he talks about trade deficits, choosing the number that refers only to trade in goods — which indeed exceeded $800 billion in 2018 and 2017. If he specified that he was talking about goods alone, we would call the claim accurate.)

The claim: “You know, it’s interesting — Puerto Rico — just so you understand, we gave Puerto Rico $91 billion for the hurricane. That’s the largest amount of money ever given to any state — talking about states and Puerto Rico; a little different — $91 billion. Texas got $30 [billion]. Florida got $12 [billion]. Puerto Rico got $91 billion. So I think the people of Puerto Rico should really like President Trump. Now, that money was given by Congress, but they got $91 billion. Now, you remember how big the hurricane was in Texas? The largest water dump in the history of our country, they say. Three times — it went in, went out, went in. Texas got $30 billion. Florida got, actually, anywhere between $9 and $12 [billion]. Puerto Rico got $91 billion. And now the Democrats are trying to hold up the money — from Georgia, from South Carolina, from Alabama, to Florida. They’re trying to hold it up. They’re hurting Florida. They’re holding — I mean, what they’re doing to North Carolina, to Louisiana. They’re trying to hold relief aid. Because Puerto Rico, which got $91 billion, have to love their president — they want to get Puerto Rico more money, so they’re willing to sacrifice Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and other states. The Democrats are doing that. They are very divisive people. Thank you very much.”

In fact: As numerous fact-checkers and independent experts have concluded, it is not true that “Puerto Rico got $91 billion”; that figure was an estimate of possible future assistance obligations to Puerto Rico over the course of decades, not actual current spending. The month Trump spoke, the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the amount actually spent on assistance to Puerto Rico was about $11 billion. (Puerto Rico’s Center for a New Economy , described by NBC as “the island’s top research think tank,” put the figure at $12.6 billion.) The Associated Press explained: “The White House has said the ($91 billion) estimate includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion approved. That $50 billion in additional money is speculative. It is based on Puerto Rico’s eligibility for federal emergency disaster funds for years ahead, involving calamities that haven’t happened. That money would require future appropriations by Congress.”” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told FactCheck.org: “It is accurate to say that $41 billion has been allocated and there will likely be billions more. But to just add up actual appropriations (most of which has not actually [been] obligated, much less cash on the ground) to some future cost estimates seems inaccurate to me.” Even if it was $91 billion, that would not be a record, the Associated Press noted: “Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the U.S government more than $120 billion — the bulk of it going to Louisiana.”

Twitter

The claim: “James Comey is a disgrace to the FBI & will go down as the worst Director in its long and once proud history. He brought the FBI down, almost all Republicans & Democrats thought he should be FIRED, but the FBI will regain greatness because of the great men & women who work there!”

In fact: It is not true that “almost all Republicans and Democrats” thought Comey should be fired. While Democratic leaders had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton, they had not gone so far as to say he should be terminated — even by Obama, much less by Trump after Trump took office. Before Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, future Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer expressed strong displeasure with Comey but stopped short of saying he should be dismissed: “I do not have confidence in him any longer...To restore my faith, I am going to have to sit down and talk to him and get an explanation for why he did this.” He went no further after Trump’s inauguration. Past and future House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN in November 2016, days before voting day, that “maybe (Comey’s) not in the right job.” But CNN noted in its article on Pelosi’s comments: “Pelosi declined to say in an interview with CNN’s Jamie Gangel that Comey should resign or be removed, but did not rule it out in the future.” She never went further after Trump’s election.

FRIDAY, MAY 10

Twitter

The claim: “Talks with China continue in a very congenial manner — there is absolutely no need to rush — as Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products. These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S....”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Interview with Politico (2 false claims)

The claim: “So, you know, it’s all based on high crimes and misdemeanors. And if you look at the Mueller report, there was no collusion. There was no conspiracy. And there was no obstruction. He said that in the first half of the sentence, and then said he couldn’t prove it. But there was no obstruction. And then the attorney general, based on the facts, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, they ruled there was no obstruction.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction,” and Mueller did not say that “in the first half of the sentence.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” Trump was correct about the attorney general William Barr and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who declared that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.

The claim: “So, you know, it’s all based on high crimes and misdemeanors. And if you look at the Mueller report, there was no collusion. There was no conspiracy. And there was no obstruction. He said that in the first half of the sentence, and then said he couldn’t prove it. But there was no obstruction. And then the attorney general, based on the facts, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, they ruled there was no obstruction. So you have no crime. And impeachment’s based on crime. And, specifically it’s based on high crimes and misdemeanors. Not ‘plus’ or whatever — it’s ‘and’ misdemeanors. Not separately, but together. So you need both.”

In fact: Impeachment is not “based on crime,” at least not in the sense of criminal offences, and you don’t “need both” misdemeanor criminal offences and other criminal offences to impeach. Though the Constitution says impeachment can be a remedy for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the “high crimes and misdemeanors” do not have to be actual crimes; the phrase can cover such non-criminal matters such as actions unbecoming a president or non-criminally abusive of the office. Congress gets to decide what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Twitter

The claim: “We have lost 500 Billion Dollars a year, for many years, on Crazy Trade with China. NO MORE!”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

Event for military mothers

The claim: “Our military is now regaining strength like it’s never had before. We had budgets of $700 billion — far, far more than ever before. And this year, $716 billion.”

In fact: Trump’s military budgets were not “far, far more than ever before.” Obama signed a $725 billion version of the same bill in 2011.

SATURDAY, MAY 11

Twitter

The claim: “I think that China felt they were being beaten so badly in the recent negotiation that they may as well wait around for the next election, 2020, to see if they could get lucky & have a Democrat win — in which case they would continue to rip-off the USA for $500 Billion a year...”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

SUNDAY, MAY 12

Twitter

The claim: “We are right where we want to be with China. Remember, they broke the deal with us & tried to renegotiate. We will be taking in Tens of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs from China.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

MONDAY, MAY 13

Twitter

The claim: “There is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs, which take effect on China today. This has been proven recently when only 4 points were paid by the U.S., 21 points by China because China subsidizes product to such a large degree.”

In fact: The Washington Post’s fact checkers have repeatedly noted that Trump’s claim about who ultimately pays his 25 per cent tariff has not been “proven”: Trump was citing a paper that used an economic model to make an estimate about Trump’s tariffs; it was not a definitive conclusion. The Post reported: “Trump is quoting from a study by European economists that predicted that a 25-percentage-point increase in tariffs raises U.S. consumer prices on all affected Chinese products by only 4.5 percent on average, while the producer price of Chinese firms declines by 20.5 percent. The study was released in November, using previously released studies from the 1990s, not actual data on prices. But a paper published March 2, by three prominent U.S. economists, found exactly the opposite had happened when actual trade data was studied. ‘Overall, using standard economic methods, we find that the full incidence of the tariff falls on domestic consumers, with a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month by the end of 2018,’ the economists reported. ‘We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers up to now, with no impact so far on the prices received by foreign exporters. We also find that U.S. producers responded to reduced import competition by raising their prices.’ Another paper, published March 3, found similar results, with the impact heaviest in Republican counties. ‘We estimate that the U.S. economy has lost $68.8 billion due to higher import prices,’ the economists concluded.”

Meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (6 false claims)

The claim: “China has been taking advantage of the United States for many, many years. I’m not just talking about during the Obama administration. You can go back long before that. And it’s been taking out four hundred, five hundred, six hundred billion dollars a year out of the United States.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “But we’re going to be meeting, as you know, at the G20 in Japan. And that will be, I think, probably, a very fruitful meeting. But we’re taking in, right now, hundreds of billions of dollars. We’re taking in billions of dollars of tariffs. And those tariffs are going to be tremendously — if you look at what we’ve done thus far with China, we’ve never taken in 10 cents until I got elected. Now we’re taking in billions and billions.”

In fact: It is not even close to true that the U.S. never had even “10 cents” of tariff revenue coming into its treasury from tariffs on China before Trump’s tariffs; the U.S. had numerous tariffs on China under previous presidents, and Obama imposed high-profile tariffs on Chinese tires, solar panels and steel. (As always: U.S. importers pay these tariffs, not China itself.)

The claim: “And out of the billions of dollars that we’re taking in, a small portion of that will be going to our farmers because China will be retaliating, probably, to a certain extent, against our farmers. We’re going to take the highest year, the biggest purchase that China has ever made with our farmers, which is about $15 billion, and do something reciprocal to our farmers so our farmers can do well.”

In fact: Fifteen billion is not the biggest amount China has ever spent on U.S. agricultural imports in a year. As Trump seemed to semi-acknowledge when he said “people could say 18, 19,” the actual record was significantly higher — $29.6 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The claim: “Again, we do much less business with China than they do with us. If you take a look at $100 billion versus $600 billion...”

In fact: Trump’s numbers were off a bit. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, U.S. goods and services exports to China in 2018 were closer to $200 billion than Trump’s “$100 billion” estimate: $179.3 billion. (Imports from China were $557.9 billion, which we’ll let Trump round to “$600 billion.”) If you only count trade in goods with China, the U.S. export figure was $120.3 billion, so Trump’s “$100 billion” estimate would be more correct — but his “$600 billion” estimate would be incorrect, since the U.S. import figure in goods was $539.5 billion.

The claim: “There has been nobody that’s ever done — and if you really look at something big, our energy business — we’re now the biggest in the world. We’re bigger than Russia. We’re bigger than Saudi Arabia. We’re bigger than anybody. That it all happened since I’ve become president because I’ve made it so that you can do that.”

In fact: The “now” is so misleading that we’re calling this claim false. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “On your campaign, sir: Will you commit to not using any information stolen from a foreign adversary? Will you make that commitment? Trump: Well, I never did use, as you probably know. That’s what the Mueller report was all about. They said, ‘No collusion.’ And I would certainly agree to that; I don’t need it.”

In fact: “Use” is a somewhat subjective word, but we say Trump did use the information stolen by Russia from Democrats in Clinton’s orbit and released through WikiLeaks — by repeatedly mentioning the WikiLeaks release and using it as ammunition for his argument that Clinton was corrupt. PolitiFact reviewed the last month of the campaign and found, “We found Trump said the word ‘WikiLeaks’ about 137 times in campaign rallies, interviews, speeches, his tweets and other social media presence, and debates.” For example, PolitiFact noted, he said at a Colorado rally in late October 2016: “The WikiLeaks revelations have revealed a degree of corruption at the highest levels of our government like nothing we have ever seen as a country before.” At a Pennsylvania rally earlier in October, he said, “Hillary Clinton, as WikiLeaks proves, is a corrupt globalist.” So while Trump may not have used Russia-stolen information for private political purposes, he did use it as a key part of his late-campaign rhetoric. According to the Mueller report, this was a deliberate strategic decision: Mueller reported that the deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, told investigators, “By the late summer of 2016, the Trump Campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”

Iftar celebration

The claim: “Where’s Alex? And drug prices have gone down for the first time in 51 years — they’ve gone down. First time in 51 years. Great job, Alex. That’s really fantastic.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

TUESDAY, MAY 14

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (4 false claims)

The claim: “We are the piggy bank that everybody likes to take advantage of, or take from. And we can’t let that happen anymore. We’ve been losing, for many years, anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion a year with China and trade with China.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “No, I wouldn’t. We have a very good dialogue. We have a dialogue going. It’ll always continue. But we made a deal with China. It was a deal that was a very good deal. It had to be a good deal; otherwise, we’re not making it. Because we’ve been down so low in trade — and other presidents should’ve done this a long time ago — we can’t just make a new deal. And I told that to President Xi. But we had a deal that was very close, and then they broke it. They really did. I mean, more than just — more than renegotiate, they really broke it. So we can’t have that happen.”

In fact: As Trump acknowledged later in this paragraph, it was not true that “we made a deal with China” before the talks collapsed. Though he had claimed a deal was close, it was never done.

The claim: “No, no, no. I wasn’t surprised. But you have to understand they do $600 billion, meaning we buy $600 billion and they buy $100 billion. We have all the advantage. It’s a very small factor for us...But if you take a look, $600 (billion) versus $100 (billion). It’s a different world.”

In fact: Trump’s numbers were off a bit. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, U.S. goods and services exports to China in 2018 were closer to $200 billion than Trump’s “$100 billion” estimate: $179.3 billion. (Imports from China were $557.9 billion, which we’ll let Trump round to “$600 billion.”) If you only count trade in goods with China, the U.S. export figure was $120.3 billion, so Trump’s “$100 billion” estimate would be more correct — but his “$600 billion” estimate would be incorrect, since the U.S. import figure in goods was $539.5 billion.

The claim: “Mr. President, are you planning to send 120,000 troops to the Middle East in response to Iran? Trump: I think it’s fake news, okay? Now, would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we’re not going to have to plan for that. And if we did that, we’d send a hell of a lot more troops than that. But I think it’s just — where was that story? In the New York Times? Well, the New York Times is fake news.”

In fact: There was no evidence that anything about the New York Times article was “fake.” Trump did not even make a specific allegation of fakeness. (The article did not say Trump was planning to send these troops to the Middle East any time soon; it began, “At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.”)

Twitter

The claim: “China buys MUCH less from us than we buy from them, by almost 500 Billion Dollars, so we are in a fantastic position.”

In fact: “Almost $500 billion” is an exaggeration. The U.S. trade deficit with China was he deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not high enough to round to “almost $500 billion,” in our view.

Speech on energy (9 false claims)

The claim: “It’s great to be here with the incredible men and women who are making America into the energy superpower of the world. We’ve just gotten to number one not so long ago. A few months ago. This was not going to happen with somebody else in office, that I can tell you.”

In fact: The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place. Not a good situation. But that’s what they were counting on: wind. And when the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t watch television that night. Your wife said, ‘What the hell did you get me into with this Green New Deal, Charlie?’”

In fact: Experts on policy related to birds told us that “five years” is incorrect. Anne Singer, director of policy communications for the National Audubon Society, noted that the three relevant federal laws do not include such penalties: “Up to 2 years in jail under federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA); up to 2 years under Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (BGEPA); up to 5 years for Lacey Act (for felony intentional violation, which involves trading, not killing).” The society’s California state director noted an April case in which a California man received 90 days in jail for killing 150 protected birds and other wildlife; officials called it the largest-ever poaching case involving raptors. Steve Holmer, vice-president of policy at the American Bird Conservancy, said in an email: “Not seeing any basis in fact for that statement. CA law considers shooting an eagle a misdemeanor.”

The claim: “It was not long ago that Sempra planned to build a natural gas import terminal on this very spot. That was in the past, when our leaders pursued policies that were anti-American energy and anti-American worker and anti-America wealth. It all ended. But those days are over. Now we have an America First energy policy, just like we have an America First policy.”

In fact: FactCheck.org noted that the facility Trump was touting was approved during the Obama administration; Trump policy was not responsible: “Sempra Energy announced its plan to create an LNG export terminal in 2012 in a partnership with Japanese companies, and as its website says: ‘The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the project in June 2014.’” FactCheck.org continued: “We asked the White House press office what ‘anti-American energy’ policies had affected Sempra’s plans to build exporting facilities, and we didn’t get a response. But the record shows Sempra started its shift from an import terminal, which opened in 2009, to exporting in 2012 and received the appropriate approvals under the Obama administration. Experts told us it takes anywhere from four to six years to build these facilities. We asked Sempra about the president’s comment, and we received an email response from Kelli Mleczko, corporate communications advisor, who said: ‘You are correct, Cameron LNG was approved in 2014.’”

The claim: “You know, in California, you go to jail for five years if you kill a bald eagle. If you go under a windmill, you see them all over the place. Not a good situation. But that’s what they were counting on: wind. And when the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t watch television that night. Your wife said, ‘What the hell did you get me into with this Green New Deal, Charlie?’”

In fact: Increasing the use of wind power would not cause television outages. “ No one is suggesting that the wind alone would supply all the electricity in any large electricity network,” said James Manwell, professor and director of the Wind Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It could supply a very large fraction, however, with no adverse impacts, and moreover wind could, together with solar photovoltaics and other renewables, supply increasingly larger fractions of our total energy (not just electricity supply) as we progressively modernize our electrical networks, incorporating smart load management and some energy storage, and more fully integrate renewables based electricity into the energy supply for heating, transportation and manufacturing.”

The claim: “Unemployment is at its lowest rate in 51 years.”

In fact: “Fifty years” would be almost exactly accurate as a rounded estimate, but “51 years” is incorrect. The April 2019 unemployment rate was an excellent 3.6 per cent, the lowest since December 1969 — less than 49-and-a-half years prior.

The claim: “And for the first time in a very long time, wages are actually rising. I would talk during the campaign that people that worked 21 years ago, one job would make more than they were making three years ago before I got things going. And they would make more money from 21 years ago than they did three years ago. And they had three jobs and two jobs. And now they’re making money.”

In fact: Trump might well have met individuals who made more money 21 years ago than they did in 2016, but it is not true that this is the first time in a long time wages have been rising overall. Overall wages have been rising since 2014. As PolitiFact reported: “For much of the time between 2012 and 2014, median weekly earnings were lower than they were in 1979 — a frustrating disappearance of any wage growth for 35 years. But that began changing in 2014. After hitting a low of $330 a week in early 2014, wages have risen to $354 a week by early 2017. That’s an increase of 7.3 percent over a roughly three-year period.” FactCheck.org reported: “For all private workers, average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) rose 4% during Obama’s last four years in office.”

The claim: “You know, I got the Veterans Choice. First time in 44 years, the veterans have choice — where they can go pick a doctor if they have to wait on line for four weeks. They can go pick a doctor instead of waiting for two days, three days. If they have to wait they go out, pick a doctor, and we pay the bill. And we actually — I don’t want to say because I don’t do it for that reason, but we actually saved a lot of money. But we’re taking care of our veterans. Well, we have the same choice on jobs, because now not only are wages rising but, very importantly, you’ve got a choice of jobs.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “I withdrew the United States from the terrible, very expensive, one-sided Paris Climate Accord. You just take a look at Paris. The president is a friend of mine. Sometimes I’ll call him up, ‘How’s it doing over there? How you doing in Paris?’ ‘Not so good. Not so good.’ The yellow vests. And you know that was all about the accord, because they were charging people tremendous amount of money and sending that money all over the world to countries that they never heard of, and the people got tired of it. I saved $1 trillion by not going with the Paris Accord. And I thought I’d take a lot of heat, and instead we’ve been praised for not doing it. We’ve been praised. The Paris Accord was an agreement that it would have shut down clean energy production in America, while allowing top foreign polluters to do whatever the hell they wanted. It was a restriction on America.”

In fact: The Paris accord would not have “shut down clean energy production in America.” It allowed each participating country to set its own voluntary targets for reducing carbon emissions — thus encouraging the countries to pursue clean energy.

The claim: “In the past two years, we’ve expanded our LNG exports to the world by nearly 500 per cent. Five hundred per cent. And it was heading south, folks. It was heading south, fast.”

In fact: It was not “heading south,” as FactCheck.org noted: “In fact, the large increase is due to projects approved before Trump took office, and the amount of exports increased by an even higher percentage in Obama’s last year. In 2015, before these operations came on line, the U.S. exported 28.4 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas. In 2016, due to the launch of the Sabine Pass operation, that amount increased to 186.8 billion cubic feet. That’s a whopping 558 percent increase. From 2016 to 2018, exports went up 479.7 percent. But these percentage increases are nearly meaningless when the starting points are relatively low.”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15

Speech to National Peace Officers’ Memorial ceremony (3 false claims)

The claim: “They have great respect for law enforcement and the job you do. As we memorialize those officers who fell in the line of duty, we also grieve for the 87 officers who died in recent years as a result of exposure to toxic debris following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

In fact: Ben Chevat, executive director of the group 9/11 Health Watch, said Trump’s “87” figure is “off”; he noted that New York Police Department lists more than 200 members the department says “have died as a result of 9/11-related illnesses,” and this does not include officers from other police services, like the Port Authority police. Trump might have been referring to some subset of these deaths, but he did not make himself clear. We will update this item if we get additional information.

The claim: “Last year, in Philadelphia, a robber shot and gravely injured a deli owner. He was a good man. He’ll never be the same. But he may serve — this criminal — a sentence that is very short. In fact, they’re looking at about three years, if you can believe this. Three years. Dangerous criminals must be punished to the fullest extent of the law.”

In fact: Trump wasn’t entirely wrong, but he left out a piece of information so critical that we’re calling this statement false: the plea agreement for the robber and shooter, Jovaun Patterson, is for 3.5 to 10 years in prison. In saying “they’re looking at about three years,” Trump did not mention that 3.5 years was the lowest bound of the agreement or that it went all the way up to 10 years.

The claim: “To stop the visa lottery program, where they take lottery systems and a country will put you into a lottery and then deposit you into the United States. I don’t think most countries are giving us their finest. Do you agree? And that’s what’s happening.”

In fact: This is, as usual, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s claim that foreign countries “put” unwanted citizens into the U.S. lottery, would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will, because they want to immigrate.

THURSDAY, MAY 16

Speech on immigration (4 false claims)

The claim: “Today, we are presenting a clear contrast: Democrats are proposing open borders, lower wages, and, frankly, lawless chaos.”

In fact: We’ll let the “lower wages” and “lawless chaos” claims go as a matter of political rhetoric, but since Trump uses “open borders” literally: the Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Importantly, we’re already building the wall, and we should have close to 400 miles built by the end of next year, and probably even more than that. It’s going up very rapidly. And I want to thank the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re doing a fantastic job on the wall. And that’s a wall that is desperately needed.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “Crucially — our plan closes loopholes in federal law to make clear that gang members and criminals are inadmissible. These are some of the worst people anywhere in the world — MS-13 and others. Inadmissible. Not coming in. We’re taking them out all the time by the thousands, a year, but they come in. They are no longer admissible. And for criminals already here, we will ensure their swift deportation. We will keep our communities safe.”

In fact: Criminals are already inadmissible to the U.S. under the Immigration and Nationality Act; so are people U.S. authorities merely have a “reasonable ground” to believe will engage in any unlawful activity. (Republicans have noted that the law does not explicitly mention gang members, and they have described this as a loophole that requires a legislative fix.)

The claim: “Currently, 66 per cent of legal immigrants come here on the basis of random chance. They’re admitted solely because they have a relative in the United States. And it doesn’t really matter who that relative is.”

In fact: It very much matters who the relative is. People in the U.S. as permanent residents, known as green card holders, can only sponsor their spouses, young children or their unmarried children age 21 and older. Citizens can attempt to bring in a larger group of people, including siblings and parents, but still not cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.

FRIDAY, MAY 17

Speech to National Association of Realtors (18 false claims)

The claim: “Please, sit down. Sit down, if you want. Sit down. You know, I tell you to sit down because otherwise they’ll say he got no standing ovations. It’s true. The fake news, they’ll say, ‘The crowd didn’t like his performance. They gave him no...” I had that the other day. They just wouldn’t sit down. So they said, ‘It wasn’t one of his better speeches. He got no standing ovations,’ because they never sat down.”

In fact: We could not find any examples of anyone in the media saying anything like “It wasn’t one of his better speeches. He got no standing ovations” for any of Trump’s speeches in the previous two weeks. (We will update this item if someone else finds an example.)

The claim: “You know, we did regulation cutting — where you couldn’t build jobs, you couldn’t build anything. You’d have a puddle on your land and they considered it to be one the great lakes of the world. It’s true. You’d have a puddle, and if it formed more than twice a year — a puddle. We used to call it a ‘puddle.’ They called it a ‘lake.’”

In fact: This claim about puddles was a common Republican talking point under Obama, but it was never accurate. The Environmental Protection Agency specifically excluded puddles from the regulation in question, known as Waters of the United States; a fact sheet about the regulation on the EPA website says, “THE CLEAN WATER RULE DOES NOT REGULATE PUDDLES.”

The claim: “You know, we did regulation cutting, where you couldn’t build jobs, you couldn’t build anything. You’d have a puddle on your land and they considered it to be one the great lakes of the world. It’s true. You’d have a puddle, and if it formed more than twice a year — a puddle. We used to call it a ‘puddle.’ They called it a ‘lake.’ It came in: lake restriction. I actually had it happen to me in Bedford, New York. I was building a development. I was going to build some really luxury, beautiful houses. A very great area. And it kept — [Audience member yells ‘New York.’] That’s right. New York, New York. I’ll tell you, they might be screwing up New York. We got to be careful, right?...But, Tracy, they had a little area where water would sort of form when it rained. And all of a sudden, I found out that I can’t build on the land. Does that make sense to you? I can’t build on the land because it was considered, for all intents and purposes, a lake. And how did people find out about the lake? My consultant told them.”

In fact: Trump did have a water-related development dispute in Bedford, New York, but it did not have anything to do with the Waters of the United States rule Trump was complaining about here, E&E News reported after reviewing records; town planner Jeffrey Osterman told that publication and the Star, “I don’t recall wetlands being a significant issue with that approval.”

The claim: “And if you look over the last 40 years, I don’t think we built a refinery, or certainly we built very few of them. And now we have a lot of refineries going up in great locations, and it’s really — it’s really incredible. Nobody thought they’d ever see a refinery built.”

In fact: Trump briefly tempered his claim here, going from the false “if you look over the last 40 years, I don’t think we built a refinery” to “or certainly we built very few of them.” The latter is true. But we’re calling the claim false because Trump then reverted to the original hyperbole when he said “nobody thought they’d ever see a refinery built.” Though it is true that few new refineries are built in the United States, it was not unheard of for refineries to be built before Trump’s presidency, nor that “nobody thought they’d ever see a refinery built.” According to a refineries list maintained by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration, one refinery was built in 2016 (by Magellan Midstream Partners), two in 2015 (by Buckeye Partners and Petromax Refining), and two in 2014 (by Dakota Prairie Refining and Kinder Morgan).

The claim: “I had one case in Palm Beach — believe it or not — a hundred-million-dollar house. Can you believe it? And the broker did a fantastic job. But I told the broker, ‘I’m paying you more than you’re supposed to get.’ He got millions. He sold the house for a hundred million dollars. You believe it? Bought it for $39 (million). Then I sold it for a hundred. It wasn’t immediate. Took a couple of years. That’s okay. I had to paint it inside a little bit — a little paint. A little fix-up. A little fix-up. I call it a ‘turnaround.’”

In fact: Trump was exaggerating at least slightly about this transaction, in which he indeed sold a Palm Beach mansion, to Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev, for tens of millions more than its purchase price. That purchase price was $41 million, not $39 million, as Trump once told now-defunct Palm Beach publication Gossip Extra: “I don’t care about the house. I bought it for $41 million, put in $3 million worth of paint and gave it a good cleaning.” (The sale price was $95 million; Trump puts the total at $100 million by including fees.)

The claim: “At the heart of America’s revival are the massive tax cuts that I signed into law a year ago. And they are like rocket fuel for America’s economy. The typical family of four earning $75,000 is now saving more than $2,000 on their income taxes — money they can put toward anything they want to put it, including save it.”

In fact: “If he means that a family making $75,000 got an average tax cut of $2,000 in 2018, that is wrong,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute. “We project the average tax cut for a middle-income household (making between about $49,000 and $85,000) was about $800 from the individual income tax alone, and about $900 if you include their share of corporate tax cuts. About 9 per cent of middle-income households paid more in individual income taxes in 2018 as a result of the (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act).”

The claim: “And we’ve also done something that, for this room, and for farmers, and for ranchers, and for, you know, small businesses — fairly big businesses, actually — we’ve virtually eliminated the very unfair estate tax, also known as the death tax. So — so, if you want to leave your real estate company to your child or your children — they like real estate, they have an aptitude, and you love them, and they love you; otherwise don’t do it. To hell with them. I’ve seen parents that are so badly treated by their kids. And the parent comes to me, ‘Oh, I love my child’” And I’m saying to myself, ‘Man, that child treats them badly.’ So I would tell him, ‘You know, your child is not a good child. Don’t leave him anything.’ But for those of you in the room, and I would say that includes probably 90 per cent — I’d say there’s 10 per cent — who does not love your child or children? Anybody want to raise your hand? No, I can’t believe that guy raised his hand. I’m not going to ask your name. I’m not going to get you. But what we have now is you don’t have to pay any estate taxes. You know what that is? That’s a big deal. Because a lot of times — and it happened with the farmers, where in some cases, they’re land rich, but not income rich, but the farm has been in the family for 150 years, and they love it, and they do well, and that’s what they do, and they love it. They wouldn’t want to do anything else. And they die and it would taxed on the value of the land, and all sorts of things happened. Then they go to the banks and they borrow money. And then they have a little down spell and they end up losing the farm, losing the business. You have no tax to pay anymore. And nobody talks about it, but to me that’s a big thing.”

In fact: Trump has not “virtually eliminated” the estate tax, let alone ensured “you don’t have to pay any estate taxes”: his tax law merely raised the threshold at which the tax must be paid. Also, it is highly misleading to suggest that the estate tax was a major burden on family farms and small businesses: very few of them were paying the tax even before Trump’s tax law was passed. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses were among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017, before Trump’s tax law. The Center wrote on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 of the total estate tax revenue.”

The claim: “To see the disastrous results of over-regulation, you take a look at what’s going on in California. Housing costs are among the highest in the country. Development restrictions make it sometimes impossible to build. What they do — I mean, years and years of turmoil. I have one job, it’s called the Coastal Commission. Oh, they’re fun to deal with. If you’re really good, you’ll have your permits within 20 years, or not have them within 20 years. ‘We vote no.’ ‘Wait a minute, we’ve been looking at these things for 20 years.’ ‘We vote no.’ How about that? How about when you’re looking at a permit, you’ve devoted millions and millions of dollars, and you go into that hearing, after years, and you have no idea if they’re going to vote yes or no?”

In fact: “Twenty years” is an exaggeration. (Trump has clashed with the commission over his desires for his Trump National Golf Course in the state.) Coastal Commission executive director Jack Ainsworth said in an email: “The Coastal Commission does not take 20 years to render decisions. As a state agency, we must comply with a state law that requires all completed permit applications to be acted on within 180 days or they are automatically deemed approved. Last year the average processing time for a permit was about 35 days.” Veteran lawyer Alan Block, a former lead attorney to to the commission while working for California’s attorney general, said, “I’m not familiar with projects that have taken 20 years but I’ve been involved with projects that have taken a good 10 years to get a matter determined by the Commission.”

The claim: “And it’s no surprise that in California — and I don’t want to single them out, but they have a train going up now — you know, this fast train? You heard about this disaster? I mean, you people know how to build on time, on budget — preferably ahead of time and under budget, right? This is a train that’s not working out so well. It’s a fast train, but not a bullet train. So it’s not that fast. And it was going to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles. And then, a thing called cost overruns happened. And many of you know about it — well, it’s in the thing today because I said, ‘We’re not paying any more money for it. California has lost control’” And it’s an incredible thing. It’s got to be a straight run. And they build a section, and then they build another section way away, and then another section. And then they want to hook it up; it doesn’t work. ‘You can’t hook it up.’ ‘You can’t. Doesn’t hook. It’s a little crooked.’ ‘The train doesn’t go good that way.’ So they say, ‘Let’s rip the sucker down; we’ll start all over again.’”

In fact: Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and a critic of the California project, said Trump was correct in some of his extended criticism but incorrect when he said “you can’t hook it up.” O’Toole said in an email, “The authority planned to build a true high-speed rail line for part of the length and then run trains at conventional speeds for the rest of the way. Eventually, it planned to add more sections of true high-speed rail lines, which means fewer curves and more straight track. Trump was wrong about ‘you can’t hook it up’ as there’s no problem connecting a high-speed track with a conventional track — France does it in a lot of places — but if you want true high-speed rail you’ll eventually have to build it.”

The claim: “They were going to show me — the (California) governor — a nice guy. A nice, young guy. Talking about forests — clean up your forests; you won’t have forest fires. Clean them up. He blames it on global warming. I said, ‘No, try cleaning the floor of the forest a little bit so you don’t have four feet of leaves and broken trees that have sit there for 25 years. Try cleaning the floor of the forest. You won’t have forest fires.’ And I got killed for that. It’s called ‘forest management.’I got killed for that. And then, about three weeks later, they announced I was right. Because I was out there last year and what I saw was so horrific with some of the fires — so many people killed. The fire was — you talk about bullets, the fire was like a bullet.”

In fact: Trump didn’t make clear who “they” were, but he falsely suggested that the governor or California or some other California authority announced he was correct when he claimed that poor forest management, not global warming, was responsible for California’s 2018 wildfires. Scientists and fire experts said they believed climate change was indeed a factor. Also, the fires that were raging when Trump began making this claim in 2018 were not forest fires at all. The Los Angeles Times explained: “The Woolsey fire started near Simi Valley in a hillside area next to the old Santa Susana Field Lab and quickly spread into nearby suburban communities...Experts have said forest management was not a factor in California’s two most destructive fires: the Camp, which has burned more than 6,000 structures this week in Paradise, and the Tubbs fire last year in wine country. Forest thinning would not have stopped either fire. Fuelled by dry grass growing amid scattered pine and oak trees, the Camp fire tore across land thinned by flames just 10 years ago. The Tubbs fire burned grassy oak woodlands, not timber land.”

The claim: “So we’re putting tariffs on (China) — we have 25 per cent tariffs on $250 billion. And they’re paying it. And believe me — you know, so many people say our people pay. They’ll pay a little bit.”

In fact: China does not pay the tariffs Trump is charging on U.S. imports of Chinese goods. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “Between that and the USMCA, our farmers are going to be very happy, very shortly. But you’re talking about maybe $15 billion to our farmers, out of $125 billion. And they’re really — you have to understand: They’ve taken the brunt because China, to negotiate with us, said, “Well, we’re not going to buy any of your farm products.” So I called Sonny Perdue, our great Secretary of Agriculture, and I said, ‘Sonny’ — I said, ‘Sonny, what’s the biggest amount they’ve ever spent in this country?’ He said, ‘About $15 billion. People could say 18, 19. But basically $15 billion.’ And I said, ‘So let’s take $15 billion, set it aside out of the $100 or $125 billion, whatever it may be, and what we’ll do is, the farmers will sell at a lower price because of competition. And what we do is we make up the difference. We have a little bit of a difference. We make up the difference.”

In fact: Fifteen billion is not the biggest amount China has ever spent on U.S. agricultural imports in a year. As Trump seemed to semi-acknowledge when he said “people could say 18, 19,” the actual record was significantly higher — $29.6 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The claim: “But the European Union treats us, I would say, worse than China. They’re just smaller. Can you believe it? They have trade barriers. They don’t want our farm products. They don’t want our cars. They don’t want — they send Mercedes Benzes in here like they’re cookies. They send BMWs here. We hardly tax them at all, John. We hardly tax them at all. Yet, you want to send our cars over there? Forget it. You want to send our agricultural products over there? ‘Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t want them. We have our own farmers.’”

In fact: While U.S. farmers do face some trade barriers in selling into the European Union, it is a gross exaggeration to say the European Union “(doesn’t) want our farm products” or that farmers should “forget it” if they want to try. According to the website of Trump’s own Department of Agriculture, the U.S. exported $11.6 billion in agricultural items to the European Union in 2016, $11.5 billion in 2017 and $13.5 billion in 2018. The EU ranked fourth for U.S. agricultural exports in 2016, fifth in 2017 and third in 2018.

The claim: “So we protect them (Europe). We spend hundreds of billions of dollars protecting them. And then they take advantage of us on trade. It’s not — it’s not fair. We lost $180 billion with the European Union.”

In fact: The U.S. had a $110 billion trade deficit with the European Union in 2018 when both goods trade and services trade are included, according to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which uses a different method, the deficit in goods trade alone was $169 billion, still not $180 billion even if Trump had been more specific about what he was discussing.

The claim: “I’ve directed federal agencies to drastically accelerate the approval process for new roads and bridges so that our families can get where they want to go, safely — and our economy can keep running full speed ahead. I mean, highways that were taking 21 years to get an approval. There’s a highway in a state not so far away — took 20 years to get it approved. And they had an opening, fairly recently — not a big road — it’s, sort of, not even a highway. It’s less than a highway. But by the time it ended up, it was 20 years late. They spent tens of million dollars on environmental impact statements. The road was a dead-straight road — the first road, dead straight — so that, if you had a rough night, you can go straight. Now it’s a road that goes this way — because of nesting — different things. Nesting. Who the hell knows what’s nesting? But whatever it is. So the road ends up being twice as long and curving like hell. And unless you’re 100 per cent sharp, you’re in deep trouble. They got these barriers, right? You know, the barriers? These — bwah, wah. So my father and I would have built that thing for nothing. For nothing. And it cost, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars and just years. And you look at the environmental impact statements. I actually brought one to one speech. I brought one. And it was — literally, it was this high, and there were like three other sections. It was just — just nonsense, okay? Just total nonsense. So we’re stopping that. We’re trying to get it down. It takes 17, 18 years to get a highway approved. We’re trying to get it down to one. We have it down to two. We think we can get it down to one. And we’re getting rid of the quadruples. You know, you have many quadruples.”

In fact: It was not clear what roadway Trump was talking about here. Regardless, his figures were incorrect. While some controversial and complicated infrastructure projects may have taken 17 or 18 years to get approved, there is no basis for Trump’s suggestion that this time frame was standard. The Treasury Department reported under Obama: “Studies conducted for the Federal Highway Administration concluded that the average time to complete a NEPA (environmental) study increased from 2.2 years in the 1970s, to 4.4 years in the 1980s, to 5.1 years in the 1995 to 2001 period, to 6.6 years in 2011.” After a change of methodology, it was 3 years and 9 months in 2015, 3 years and 8 months in 2016. Further, there is no current evidence that Trump has already succeeded in reducing the standard approval time frame to two years, although he says this is his intention. His Department of Transportation reported a median approval time of 3 years, 10 months in 2017.

The claim: “That (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) was her (Elizabeth Warren’s) baby. And she had the man that was in charge of that running in the great state of Ohio. But Mike (DeWine) did a good job, and I did good job. We fought, and your current governor came from behind and he was down by six or seven points with a couple of days left. We went out, we made a rally like you wouldn’t believe, in the great state of Ohio. And he ended up winning by six or seven points. And that was a great day for Ohio. We love Ohio. That was a great day.”

In fact: Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine beat Democratic opponent Richard Cordray by 3.7 percentage points, 50.4 per cent to 46.7 per cent, not “six or seven points.”

The claim: “No, they put out — the fake news — they put out messages — these people right back here. They put out messages that I’m angry with my people. I’m not angry with them. I make my own decisions. But I’m ‘angry with my people.’ I’m ‘not angry with my people.’ I’m ‘worse than they are; they’re worse than we are. They’re more militant.’ Mike Pompeo is doing a great job. Bolton is doing a great job. But they make it sound like it’s a conflict. And the good news — I was thinking today, I said, ‘Gee, what must our adversaries think?’ And then I look and I say, ‘You know, it’s probably a good thing because they’re saying, “Man, I don’t know where these people are coming from.” Right? But they put out false — you know, they say, ‘confidential sources.’ Do you ever notice they never write the names of people anymore. Everything is ‘a source says...’ There is no source. The person doesn’t exist. The person is not alive. It’s bullshit. Okay? It’s bullshit. ‘Three people who were at that meeting’ — you know, a meeting of like seven — ‘three people have confirmed that this happened and that happened.’ There were no three people. They make it up. These are bad people. These are people — that’s why I came up with the term ‘fake news.’”

In fact: We can’t say whether Trump is right or wrong about the accuracy of news reports about his supposed tensions with members of his team over how to approach Iran and other military matters. However, he has never shown any evidence that major newspapers have invented imaginary sources for these reports.

The claim: “And they have a hundred-trillion-dollar Green New Deal. Nobody has any idea what the hell it is. They know that you can’t take a plane anymore; you have to take a train to Hawaii. Train. A train to Australia and a train — hey, if they can’t build from San Francisco to Los Angeles — what’s going to happen when they say, ‘Let’s build a train to Europe’? ‘Let’s build one up to Europe. We’ll do a fast train.’ A hundred miles an hour. Let’s see. Well, a plane goes six, so you got a long trip on a train, I’ll tell you. This is crazy. This is crazy.”

In fact: Nothing in Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal would require people to take trains to Hawaii or Europe. Trump’s jab had at least some basis: a Green New Deal “FAQ” page posted on the website of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading proponent of the proposal, called for the government to “build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” But other Democrats did not endorse the FAQ (which Ocasio-Cortez’s office quickly deleted), just the official resolution, which said nothing of the sort.

Twitter

The claim: “Border Patrol is apprehending record numbers of people at the Southern Border.”

In fact: U.S. authorities were indeed apprehending high numbers of people at the Mexican border at the time: 109,144 in April 2019, a new one-month high for the Trump era. But it was not even close to a record. In 2000, 180,050 people were apprehended in April. In 2001, it was 142,813 in April. In 2002, it was 121,921. In 2004, it was 135,468. In 2005, it was 140,062.

Twitter

The claim: “My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics. A really bad situation. TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!”

In fact: We don’t declare Trump inaccurate when he makes accusations of mere “treasonous” behaviour, since we give him leeway to use non-literal political language, but here, he is saying that people involved in the Russia investigation literally committed the criminal offence of treason and should be imprisoned for it. That is simply false.

Twitter

The claim: “Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?”

In fact: “Acid washed” is a nonsensical Trump invention. Clinton’s team deleted emails using a free computer software program called BleachBit. Trump seized on the phrase “bleach,” though the program does not involve actual bleach, and transformed it into “acid.”

SATURDAY, MAY 18

Twitter

The claim: “Courts & Dems in Congress, neither of which have a clue, are trying to FORCE migrants into our Country! OUR COUNTRY IS FULL, OUR DETENTION CENTERS, HOSPITALS & SCHOOLS ARE PACKED. Crazy!”

In fact: Trump could make a reasonable argument that the U.S. asylum system is full; U.S. immigration authorities report that their facilities and capabilities have been swamped by the recent surge of families and unaccompanied minors. But it is obviously false that the United States as a whole is “full.” As the New York Times noted: “Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.”

SUNDAY, MAY 19

Twitter

The claim: “For all of the Fake News Sunday Political Shows, whose bias & dishonesty is greater than ever seen in our Country before, please inform your viewers that...got rid of the disastrous Individual Mandate & will protect Pre-Existing Conditions...”

In fact: This claim is belied by Trump’s actions. He has tried to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, his administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

Twitter

The claim: “...drug prices down for first time in 51 years (& soon will drop much further)...”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

Twitter

The claim: “For all of the Fake News Sunday Political Shows, whose bias & dishonesty is greater than ever seen in our Country before, please inform your viewers that...our Vets are finally being taken care of and now have Choice...”

In fact: Trump’s “now” is so misleading that we’re calling it false: the Veterans Choice program was actually signed into law by Obama in 2014. The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

Twitter

The claim: “Never a fan of @justinamash, a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy. If he actually read the biased Mueller Report, ‘composed’ by 18 Angry Dems who hated Trump........he would see that it was nevertheless strong on NO COLLUSION and, ultimately, NO OBSTRUCTION.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Twitter

The claim: “Our Country is FULL, will not, and can not, take you in!”

In fact: Trump could make a reasonable argument that the U.S. asylum system is full; U.S. immigration authorities report that their facilities and capabilities have been swamped by the recent surge of families and unaccompanied minors. But it is obviously false that the United States as a whole is “full.” As the New York Times noted: “Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.”

Interview with Fox News’s Steve Hilton (16 false claims)

The claim: “Well, really very simply, we have companies coming in here, as you know, by the dozens and by the hundreds and big ones, car companies, Honda’s coming in with $14.5 billion.”

In fact: Trump seemed to be confusing Honda with Toyota. Even if he had said Toyota, he would be off a bit: the company announced in March 2019 that it would increase its planned investment to “nearly $13 billion” (it originally said $10 billion in 2017),

The claim: “And what we want to do is put up a very strong border. We’ll have, by the end of next year, 450 to 500 miles built of the — of the wall itself and the border wall. And it’s imperative — you know, I read so much where the Democrats like to say you don’t need — we’re going to have drones flying around, you have thousands of people, the drone doesn’t do a thing. So the wall is being built as we speak. We’ll have close to 500 miles done by the end of next year, which is really something, and it’ll have a big impact.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “The Democrats do stick together. So if they decide, I guess, leadership decides that they don’t want to have it, then we’re going to have a continuation. But we’ve gotten very tough on the border. We’re letting — you know, we have a catch and release, where you catch and then you have to, by law, release, or you have to take them to a court. Nobody has a court system. Who — what country has a court system where somebody walks into the country?”

In fact: Unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. do not get the right to a trial if they are caught after merely touching U.S. land; in cases where they are caught near the border, they are subject to rapid deportation, known as expedited removal, without seeing a judge. If they say they are seeking asylum, they do have a right to a legal process — but the U.S. is far from the only country to afford them this right. “This statement is patently false,” James Hathaway, law professor and director of the refugee and asylum law program at the University of Michigan, said in an email in response to a previous version of Trump’s claim. “It is completely routine in other countries that, like the U.S., have signed the UN refugee treaties for asylum-seekers to have access to the domestic legal system to make a protection claim (and to be allowed in while the claim is pending). If anything, the U.S. is aberrational in the opposite direction: U.S. domestic law falsely treats the granting of protection to refugees as a matter of discretion, whereas international law *requires* a grant of protection to anyone who meets the refugee definition. This doesn’t mean that refugees have a right to stay in the U.S. or anywhere else forever — but they *do* have a right to stay for the duration of the persecutory risk, unless another safe country that has also signed the refugee treaties agrees to take them in.”

The claim: “But the big one is China. We have a trade deficit with China of $500 billion; that’s not even conceivable, and we’ve had it for years. And it goes up and it goes down, but it’s from $200 billion to $500 billion and $600 billion — not million, billion dollars a year — and somebody had to do something about it. And we pretty much had a deal.” And: “But if there’s one reason that China — and you understand what I’m going to say — didn’t make that deal, it’s because they’re hoping that in 16 months Donald Trump will be defeated by anyone of those Democrats, and they’ll go back to making $500 billion a year.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “But with the farmer, because I love the farmer, we are going to be taking in possibly $100 billion, possibly more than that in tariffs. We never took in 10 cents from China.”

In fact: It is not even close to true that the U.S. never had even “10 cents” of tariff revenue coming into its treasury from tariffs on China before Trump’s tariffs; FactCheck.org noted that tariffs on China have generated at least $8 billion ever year since 2009. The U.S. had numerous tariffs on China under previous presidents, and Obama imposed high-profile tariffs on Chinese tires, solar panels and steel. (As always: U.S. importers pay these tariffs, not China itself.)

The claim: “So what I’m going to do is out of the $100-plus billion, I said to my farm people, I said to Sonny Perdue, Department of Agriculture — secretary of Agriculture — ‘Sonny, what’s the most money that China has ever paid toward agriculture, toward buying food product?’ He said $15 billion a number of years ago. I said ‘Is that the most?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ Some people say closer to $20 (billion), but $15 billion was about the most. I said ‘Good. I’m going to take $15 billion out of the $100 billion, and I’m going to give that to our farmers.’”

In fact: Fifteen billion is not the biggest amount China has ever spent on U.S. agricultural imports in a year. As Trump seemed to semi-acknowledge when he said “some people say closer to 20” the actual record was significantly higher — $29.6 billion in the 2014 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The claim: “Since I’ve been here — since I’ve been president we’ve made almost $10 trillion in wealth, and China has lost $10 trillion in wealth. They’ve lost a tremendous amount.”

In fact: There was no apparent basis for Trump’s $10 trillion figure. Trump has sometimes specified that he is talking about losses in the Chinese stock market, but these are nowhere near $10 trillion. George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, said “I can’t really make those numbers add up to anything I’m aware of.” Magnus noted that the entire market capitalization of the Shanghai index was just over $5 trillion (U.S.) at the time. Derek Scissors, an expert on U.S. economic relations with Asia at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, also said a $10 trillion drop in Chinese wealth is “not in evidence.”

The claim: “Well look, Iran’s been a problem for so many years. If you go back, just take a look at all of the conflict that they’ve caused, and the deal that President Obama made was a horror show, the Iran Nuclear Deal. Because basically it says that in five years from now they’re going to have an open path to make nuclear weapons.”

In fact: “This is totally false,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project International Crisis Group. “As of 2023, some of the limits of the nuclear deal will start to fade away, but the most important limit (on the volume of low enriched uranium that Iran can store) will remain in place until 2030, obstructing any Iranian dash toward nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Iran now had one of the most thoroughly monitored nuclear fuel cycles in the world, allowing the UN’s nuclear watchdog to quickly detect any weatherization effect and ring alarm bells. Another important point is that even once the JCPOA’s limits sunset, Iran would have been bound by the NPT’s limits and inspection mechanisms. By pushing the Iranians to start rolling back some of the restraints on their program under the nuclear deal, Trump is in fact bringing the clock forward for the Iranians.” The Associated Press said of Trump’s claim: “That’s a misrepresentation of what the deal required . Iran would not have access to nuclear weapons capability in a ‘very short period’ without violating the terms of the 2015 accord...During the 15-year life of most provisions of the deal, Iran’s capabilities were limited to a level where it could not produce a nuclear bomb. Iran was thought to be only months away from a bomb when the deal came into effect. After 15 years, Iran could have an array of advanced centrifuges ready to work, the limits on its stockpile would be gone and, in theory, it could then throw itself into producing highly enriched uranium. But nothing in the deal prevented the West from trying to rein Iran in again with sanctions. The deal included a pledge by Iran never to seek a nuclear weapon. In return, partners in the deal eased sanctions on Iran.”

The claim: “...The deal that President Obama made was a horror show, the Iran Nuclear Deal...So he made this terrible deal, paid $150 billion...”

In fact: The “$150 billion” figure has no basis. Experts said Iran had about $100 billion in worldwide assets at the time; after the nuclear deal unfroze Iranian assets, Iran was able to access a percentage of that $100 billion, but not all of it. PolitiFact reported: “The actual amount available to Iran is about $60 billion, estimates Garbis Iradian, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew pinned it at $56 billion, while Iranian officials say $35 billion, according to Richard Nephew, an expert on economic sanctions at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.”

The claim: “I think that if you look, when I went to North Korea there were nuclear tests all the time, there were missiles going up all the time...But, they haven’t had any tests over the last two years — zero. There’s a chart and it shows 24 tests, 22 tests, 18 tests. Then I come, and once I’m there for a little while you know, we went through a pretty rough rhetorical period.”

In fact: North Korea’s last nuclear test was on September 3, 2017, well under two years prior when Trump made this comment in May 2019. North Korea had also conducted more than 15 missile tests over the previous two years — including one, of short-range missiles, earlier in this same month Trump spoke. Trump’s own senior officials, including acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, confirmed that this was a missile test. “Let me just be clear: these were short-range missiles,” Shanahan told reporters, CNN reported.

The claim: “Regulations didn’t allow you to do — you know, yesterday as you probably saw, I was in Louisiana opening up a $10 billion LNG plant that would’ve never been approved under another type of administration, never.”

In fact: FactCheck.org noted that the facility Trump was touting was approved during the Obama administration; Trump policy was not responsible: “Sempra Energy announced its plan to create an LNG export terminal in 2012 in a partnership with Japanese companies, and as its website says: ‘The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the project in June 2014.’” FactCheck.org continued: “We asked the White House press office what ‘anti-American energy’ policies had affected Sempra’s plans to build exporting facilities, and we didn’t get a response. But the record shows Sempra started its shift from an import terminal, which opened in 2009, to exporting in 2012 and received the appropriate approvals under the Obama administration. Experts told us it takes anywhere from four to six years to build these facilities. We asked Sempra about the president’s comment, and we received an email response from Kelli Mleczko, corporate communications advisor, who said: ‘You are correct, Cameron LNG was approved in 2014.’”

The claim: “What I’ve done with energy in this country — we’re now the number one in the world. That wouldn’t have happened if Hillary got in or somebody else got in — probably even if another Republican got in.”

In fact: The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “But I think maybe the strongest — look, NATO is ripping us off. I got the NATO countries, we’re defending them, to put up $100 billion more, and the secretary of — general of NATO, Stoltenberg — great guy. He’s my biggest fan, because NATO is going down like this, it was going down, the funding. And now it went down — as soon as I got in, I raised $100 billion from NATO countries.”

In fact: Defence spending by NATO members was not “going down” at all, let alone “like a very steep mountain,” before Trump took office. It rose by 1.84 per cent in 2015 and 3.08 per cent in 2016, official NATO figures show. (It is unclear how much of the Trump-era increase is a result of Trump’s hectoring of NATO leaders and how much is because of pre-planned increases. Also, the $100 billion has not yet been spent; Stoltenberg said during a White House visit that it would be a $100 billion increase by the end of 2020.)

The claim: “And we had the first year in 51 years where drug prices came down this year. First time in 51 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: Question: “There’s another book coming out, Fire and Fury 2. I don’t know what the title is, it’s going to be all over again, all this kind of stuff. What do you make of that?” Trump: “Donald Trump: Well, I never even did an interview with these peop — I don’t even know who the person is. I did an interview with that person — I mean, there are many books. Books come out every week. But I’ve never even heard the book. You tell me now — I never did an interview with him — other than years ago for a magazine, and he actually wrote a nice story about me. It’s a big con job.”

In fact: Trump eventually corrected himself, but his dishonesty earlier in the paragraph was so dizzying that we’re still calling this a false claim. Trump knows author Michael Wolff, with whom he did a lengthy profile interview. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Trump spoke to Wolff for “five to seven minutes” at one point during Trump’s presidency about something unrelated to Wolff’s book; Wolff, conversely, said he “spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and in the White House.” Further, Trump has long been familiar with Wolff’s work, which has focused on elite figures in New York City. “Trump has known Michael Wolff for years!” tweeted Washington Post political reporter Josh Dawsey.

The claim: “Look at Joe Biden...Biden, he calls them and says, ‘Don’t you dare persecute, if you don’t fire this prosecutor’ — the prosecutor was after his son. Then he said, ‘If you fire the prosecutor, you’ll be OK. And if you don’t fire the prosecutor, we’re not giving you $2 billion in loan guarantees,’ or whatever he was supposed to give.”

In fact: Trump had part of the story right but not the key part. Biden has boasted about his 2016 demand, as vice-president, for Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin — saying he would withhold $1 billion (not $2 billion) in loan guarantees if the termination was not done before he left the country in “about six hours.” Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, served on the board of the Burisma Group, a large gas company; Shokin was investigating others involved with Burisma. However, as FactCheck.org noted, “There is no evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine on his behalf. A few days before Fox News aired the Trump interview, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s current prosecutor general, gave his own interview to Bloomberg News and said: ‘Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.’ Lutsenko told Bloomberg that the prosecutor general’s office in 2014 — before Shokin took office — opened a corruption investigation against Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and numerous others. He said the probe’s focus was Serghi Kurchenko, who owned a number of gas companies, and a transaction that occurred in November 2013, months before Biden joined Burisma.”

MONDAY, MAY 20

Twitter

The claim: “So, I’ve given more money to Puerto Rico than, I believe, any president ever. They’ve gotten $91 billion for the hurricane.”

In fact: As numerous fact-checkers and independent experts have concluded, it is not true that “Puerto Rico got $91 billion”; that figure was an estimate of possible future assistance obligations to Puerto Rico over the course of decades, not actual current spending. The month Trump spoke, the Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the amount actually spent on assistance to Puerto Rico was about $11 billion. (Puerto Rico’s Center for a New Economy , described by NBC as “the island’s top research think tank,” put the figure at $12.6 billion.) The Associated Press explained: “The White House has said the ($91 billion) estimate includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion approved. That $50 billion in additional money is speculative. It is based on Puerto Rico’s eligibility for federal emergency disaster funds for years ahead, involving calamities that haven’t happened. That money would require future appropriations by Congress.”” Steve Ellis, vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told FactCheck.org: “It is accurate to say that $41 billion has been allocated and there will likely be billions more. But to just add up actual appropriations (most of which has not actually [been] obligated, much less cash on the ground) to some future cost estimates seems inaccurate to me.” Even if it was $91 billion, that would not be a record, the Associated Press noted: “Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost the U.S government more than $120 billion — the bulk of it going to Louisiana.”

Campaign rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania (16 false claims)

The claim: “We’ve ended the last administration’s eight-year war on Pennsylvania energy, and we’re unleashing clean coal and shale...”

In fact: The term “clean coal” is false in itself. There is nothing “clean” about coal. Even if one were to believe that there is indeed “clean coal,” a term that is the creation of industry spin, the term is not meant to be applied to all coal from a country or state, which is how Trump uses it. The phrase, the New York Times reported, “is often understood to mean coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks and bury it underground as a way of limiting global warming.”

The claim: “We’ve ended the last administration’s eight-year war on Pennsylvania energy, and we’re unleashing clean coal and shale, and America is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world.”

In fact: The “now” is so misleading that we think it makes the statement false: this is not a new accomplishment. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “The United States added 263,000 jobs just last month, far exceeding any expectations. And since the election, we’ve created nearly 6 million new jobs...but that includes a half a million brand new manufacturing jobs, which the previous administration said will never happen, will never happen, and it wouldn’t have happened if you had them or the like.”

In fact: Trump’s numbers are correct, but it is not true that the Obama administration said that a large number of manufacturing jobs would not be created. At a televised PBS town hall in Elkhart, Indiana in 2016, Obama did say that a certain subset of manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back” — but he boasted that some manufacturers are indeed “coming back to the United States,” that “we’ve seen more manufacturing jobs created since I’ve been president than any time since the 1990s,” and that “we actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today, than we’ve had in most of our history.” Obama mocked Trump for Trump’s campaign claims that he was going to bring back manufacturing jobs that had been outsourced to Mexico, saying: “And when somebody says — like the person you just mentioned who I’m not going to advertise for — that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is he doesn’t have an answer.” But, again, Obama made clear that he was talking about a certain segment of manufacturing jobs, not all of them.

The claim: “The wall is being built as we speak, we’ll have almost 500 miles of wall by the end of next year.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “Thank you very much. He said, ‘I’m from San Diego,’ you believe that? He said, ‘I’m from San Diego and we need that wall.’ And you know in San Diego, as you know, it’s going up and now it’s up and here’s what they did in California, they wanted the wall so badly, and so I did it, and I said you know, maybe I shouldn’t do it politically. Let them ask, I did it, and now it’s beautiful: people not coming in, it’s beautiful, right? In San Diego. And now they go out and say, ‘We didn’t want the wall in the first place.’ They didn’t. They wanted the wall desperately because they were being flooded with illegal immigrants. Is that right? Flooded.”

In fact: There is no basis for Trump’s repeated claim that San Diego asked or begged him to build a border wall there, or that San Diego or California wanted a wall at all. San Diego city council voted 5-3 in September 2017 to express opposition, and even the Republican mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has stated that he is opposed: “Mayor Faulconer has been clear in his opposition to a border wall across the entirety of the U.S. southern border,” a spokesperson said in September 2017. Both the former California governor, Jerry Brown, and the current governor, Gavin Newsom, are Democrats who oppose the wall, and polls suggest California residents have been overwhelmingly opposed. A September 2017 poll from the Public Policy Institute of California, for example, found that 73 per cent of California adults were opposed.

The claim: “Because you have some of — look, you know this, you have some of these socialist wackos, they want to double and triple your taxes and that won’t come close to paying for it. They want to knock down all buildings in Manhattan and rebuild them without windows, you know about that. Let’s rebuild them, glass is no good. We don’t want windows, I used to love the view, but I think we’ll all be forced to close up windows. No, it’s crazy what they’re saying, so many different things.”

In fact: Nobody is proposing to knock down all buildings in Manhattan and rebuild them without windows. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had held an event in the lobby of Trump Tower a week prior to promote a new law requiring owners of large residential and commercial buildings, such as Trump, to conduct renovations beginning in 2014 to improve energy efficiency; the requirements include new windows, not eliminating windows. (The previous month, de Blasio suggested he was planning to “ban” steel-and-glass skyscrapers. But he soon clarified that he would not actually try to ban them. “If a company wants to build a big skyscraper, they can use a lot of glass if they do all the other things needed to reduce the emissions,” he said.)

The claim: “It’s no wonder that when Joe Biden announced he’s running for president. By the way, by the way, by the way we have thousands of people so — and this is it, I’m not even announcing today, we’ll wait for a couple of weeks, OK? This is just, we go in for Fred (Keller), look at the thousands and thousands of people we have. Now, they said he had 600 people, no, not very good, not very good. I’d say 150, and that was an announcement, right? I’d, say 150 people, but he announced he’s running for president.”

In fact: Independent observers said Biden indeed had about 600 people at his first public event after announcing his presidential candidacy, at a union hall in Pennsylvania. (The Atlantic reported that”100 of those spots” were occupied by journalists.)

The claim: “Foreign countries liked it much better, that’s what they want. They want Biden so that China can continue to make $500 billion a year and more ripping off the United States. They like it.”

In fact: The U.S. has never once had a $500 billion trade deficit with China, according to U.S. government data, let alone a $600 billion trade deficit with China. The deficit was $379 billion in 2018 and $337 billion in 2017. The 2018 goods deficit with China was a record $419 billion — still not $500 billion.

The claim: “You look at what these countries have made. We lost on just trade, $800 billion on average for many years, $800 billion, not million, eight hundred million’s a lot. Eight hundred billion is not even conceivable, and we didn’t do anything about it, and I mean, not only President Obama, I mean others too.”

In fact: The U.S. trade deficit was $621 billion in 2018 and $566 billion in 2017, and it had never previously been $800 billion for a year. (Trump habitually ignores trade in services when he talks about trade deficits, choosing the number that refers only to trade in goods — which indeed exceeded $800 billion in 2018 and 2017. If he specified that he was talking about goods alone, we would call the claim accurate.)

The claim: “...no betrayal of American workers has been worse than the Democrat Party’s pursuit of open borders.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Democrat-backed policies have left our borders overrun our detention facilities overwhelmed — as fast as we build them, they fill up — and our hospitals, schools and public resources overburdened. Our country is full, we don’t want people coming up here. Our country is full. We want Mexico to stop, we want all of them to stop. Our country is packed to the gills. We don’t want them coming up.”

In fact: Trump could make a reasonable argument that the U.S. asylum system is full; U.S. immigration authorities report that their facilities and capabilities have been swamped by the recent surge of families and unaccompanied minors. But it is obviously false that the United States as a whole is “full.” As the New York Times noted: “Nationwide, the United States has less than one-third of the population density of the European Union, and a quarter of the density of China.”

The claim: “You take a look at what we’ve done between regulations and taxes, and I mean think of it, Right To Try. You know what Right To Try is? I won’t go into it, you don’t want to be there, but now we can give them the benefit of the great research we have the best in the world and there’s a lot of great things happening. I signed it eight months ago, a lot of great things happening with Right To Try.”

In fact: Trump signed the Right to Try law on May 30, 2018. He was speaking here on May 20, 2019. That is almost a full year. Trump regularly moves the date of his accomplishments closer to the present.

The claim: “I withdrew the United States — I thought I’d be hit hard on this one, and I wasn’t ; just ask, how are they doing in Paris? — from the past administration’s job-killing Paris Climate Accord, which would have cost a fortune and would have hurt our country horribly. We will never allow foreign bureaucrats and countries to trample on our sovereignty or to shut down our jobs, which is what that would have done.”

In fact: The Paris accord would not have involved foreign bureaucrats shutting down American jobs. It allowed every participating country to set its own standards for reducing carbon emissions. If Trump thought Obama’s standards were overly ambitious, he could have set his own.

The claim: “We’ve launched a historic initiative to reduce the price of prescription drugs, and last year, for the first time in 51 years, drug prices went down. First time in 51 years.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “And we passed VA Choice and VA Accountability to give our veterans the care that they deserve, and they’ve been trying to pass these things for 45 years.”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

The claim: “Now, we caught ‘em. They were spying — they were spying on our campaign. I’ll tell you what, if that ever happened to the other side, this thing would have been over two years ago, and you know it would have been treason. They would have called it treason and that’s what it is. It was treason and it should never be allowed to happen to another president again ever, ever, ever.”

In fact: There is simply no hint of any evidence that anyone involved in the Russia investigation committed treason.

Interview with WBRE Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (5 false claims)

The claim: “Well, always, we are going to have pre-existing conditions to be taken care of.”

In fact: This claim is belied by Republicans’ actions. The party tried repeatedly during Trump’s early presidency to replace Obamacare with a law that would give insurers more freedom to discriminate against people with pre-existing health conditions. As part of a Republican lawsuit to try to get Obamacare struck down, Trump’s administration is formally arguing that the law’s protections for pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional and should be voided. Trump has not said what he would like to replace these protections with.

The claim: “We’re building massive amounts of wall right now. By the end of next year we’re going to have probably close to 500 miles of wall that’s gonna stop a lot of the problem that we have.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “We’re working with the Democrats but they seem to want open borders. It’s crazy, they want open borders...So they are really for open borders, they’re really for crime, because that means crime.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “I intend that the coal industry would be — and I call it ‘clean coal’ because you could do it. Clean coal is really heading back in the right direction and you see it.”

In fact: The term “clean coal” is false in itself. Even if one were to believe that there is indeed “clean coal,” a term that is the creation of industry spin, the term is not meant to be applied to all coal from a country or state, which is how Trump uses it. The phrase, the New York Times reported, “is often understood to mean coal plants that capture the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks and bury it underground as a way of limiting global warming.” As the Washington Post wrote: “Saying that the United States exported clean coal is like saying that the United States is shipping bathrobes overseas each time a shipping container full of cotton leaves an American port. Maybe it will be a bathrobe, but that’s not what we’re sending.”

The claim: “Well, the coal mining industry’s really starting to go, you know, it was — it was out of business with the Democrats, you know that. They had it restricted out of business. Now it’s really starting to go in a very positive direction. Big numbers are coming out, foreign countries like Vietnam and other countries are buying our coal in record amounts and whether it’s West Virginia or Pennsylvania a lot of other place, we’re selling a lot of coal.”

In fact: The coal industry was not “restricted out of business” by the Democrats, said James Van Nostrand, director of West Virginia University’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development: “The decline in coal production in the U.S. over the past several years had very little to do with environmental regulations. Rather, coal was largely displaced as the leading fuel to generate electricity by natural gas, primarily due to the cheap and plentiful supplies of natural gas from shale gas development. More recently, renewable energy — both wind and utility-scale solar — have proven to be less expensive than continuing to operate existing coal plants. Coal plants in the US are closing at the same rate under Trump that they were under Obama. Coal is simply not cost-competitive with natural gas, wind and solar as a means of generating electricity. The Democrats have nothing to do with these market forces, which cannot be overcome even with the dismantling of environmental regulations at the EPA.”

TUESDAY, MAY 21

Twitter

The claim: “So even though I didn’t have to do it with Presidential Privilege, I allowed everyone to testify, including White House Counsel Don McGahn (for over 30 hours), to Robert Mueller and the 18 Angry Trump-Hating Democrats, and they arrived at a conclusion of NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION!”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not conclude that there was “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22

Twitter

The claim: The Paris accord would not have involved foreign bureaucrats shutting down American jobs. It allowed every participating country to set its own standards for reducing carbon emissions. If Trump thought Obama’s standards were overly ambitious, he could have set his own.

In fact: There is simply no evidence that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia was illegal or started illegally. Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican appointed by Trump. Even the famous memo released by House after Committee chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican, acknowledged that the investigation began when Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had obtained damaging information on Clinton, before this was publicly known; the Australian diplomat had then passed on the information to U.S. officials. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” the Nunes memo said.

Twitter

The claim: “Everybody, including me, thought that when the 40 Million Dollar Mueller Report was released with No Collusion and No Obstruction (of a crime caused by others), that was the end.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Unscheduled speech about Nancy Pelosi and Democratic investigations (8 false claims)

The claim: “We have the best unemployment numbers that we’ve had in the history of our country — in some cases, 51 years, but generally in the history of our country.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for April 2019 was 3.6 per cent. That was the lowest since 1969, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here, instead suggesting he was speaking about the rate for the general public.)

The claim: “And instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that had just said that I was doing a cover-up. I don’t do cover-ups. You people know that probably better than anybody.”

In fact: Trump was definitely involved in at least one cover-up: he reimbursed his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, for paying porn performer Stormy Daniels to stay silent about allegedly having sex with the married Trump in 2006; Trump then tried to cover up the cover-up, lying that he did not know about the payment or where the money came from. (Cohen and prosecutors allege that Trump directed Cohen to make the payment, for which Cohen pleaded guilty to a violation of campaign-finance law. Trump denies this, but he acknowledges reimbursing Cohen.) Special counsel Robert Mueller also reported that Trump falsified a media statement from his son, Donald Trump Jr., to try to prevent his son from disclosing that he had met with a Russian lawyer during the campaign because the lawyer had promised “information helpful to the campaign” (damaging information about Hillary Clinton).

The claim: “And of the 19 people that were heading up this investigation, or whatever you want to call it, with Bob Mueller, they were contributors to the Democrat Party, most of them, and to Hillary Clinton. They hated President Trump. They hated him with a passion. They went to her big party after the election that turned out to be a wake, not a party. It was a wake. And they were very angry. These are the people that, after two years and 40 million or 35 million dollars — it’ll end up being a lot more than that by the time all the bills are paid — this is what happened: No collusion. No obstruction. No nothing.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “Even last night, we had a great election. I went there on Monday. We had a — an election for Fred Keller. It was a 50/50 shot, and he won in a landslide. We went and we did a rally. Hardly mentioned today. And yet, if he lost, it would have been the biggest story in the country — even bigger than this witch hunt stuff that you guys keep writing about.”

In fact: You could make an argument that every election between a Democrat and a Republican is a “50/50 shot,” but it would be a bad argument. Keller was overwhelmingly favoured in the special election in Pennsylvania’s 12th District. The seat was open because a Republican member of Congress, Tom Marino, resigned — after winning the seat by 32 points in 2018. Fox News noted that the area was overwhelmingly pro-Trump in 2016: “Tuesday’s result is no surprise, as the 12th District is solidly Republican and voters there backed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election by a margin of better than 2 to 1 over Democrat Hillary Clinton.” In short: this was a safe race for Republicans, not a tossup.

The claim: “So here’s the bottom line: There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. We’ve been doing this since I’ve been president. And, actually, the crime was committed on the other side. We’ll see how that all turns out. I hope it turns out well. But to my way of thinking — and I know a lot of you agree with me — the crime was committed on the other side.”

In fact: Trump was typically vague here, but there is no evidence that “the other side” of the Russia investigation — likely meaning either the investigators or the Democratic Party — committed related crimes.

The claim: “This whole thing was a takedown attempt at the president of the United States. And, honestly, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for the way you report it so dishonestly — not all of you, but many of you.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “takedown” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: “Drug prices are coming down — first time in 51 years — because of my administration.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “So that’s what you have. All of these things — look at that — all of these things. Five hundred witnesses that I allowed to testify. It’s a disgrace.”

In fact: It is not true that Trump “allowed” all 500 witnesses to testify. That is the approximate total number of witnesses Mueller’s team interviewed. Some of Trump’s aides were among the witnesses, but many other witnesses were not under his control in any way. The witness list included, for example, former FBI director James Comey and former acting attorney general Sally Yates, both of whom Trump fired.

Twitter

The claim: “Democrats don’t want to fix the loopholes at the Border. They don’t want to do anything. Open Borders and crime!”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

THURSDAY, MAY 23

Speech on aid for farmers affected by tariffs (13 false claims)

The claim: “We’re taking swift action to remedy all of the injustice that’s been done over the years — in particular, you could say with our farmers. They’re patriots. They stood up and they were with me. They didn’t say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do this because we’re going to have a bad year.’ Because they’ve had 20 bad years, if you really look. You take a look at those charts way back — longer than that. It’s just been a steady spiral down. So we will ensure that our farmers get the relief they need and very, very quickly.” And: “”And again, if you look — go back 20 years, the farms have come down; the prices have been coming down for many, many years — long before I ever thought about doing this. So we’re going to be very successful.”

In fact: Farmers have not experienced a “steady spiral down” for “20” years. Net farm income doubled between 2000 and 2013, from just under $60 billion to just over $120 billion, with a sharp increase starting in 2009 and ending in 2014. The Congressional Research Service reported in February 2018: “U.S. farm income experienced a golden period during 2011 through 2014 due to strong commodity prices and robust agricultural exports — in 2014 U.S. agricultural exports achieved a record of $152.3 billion.”

The claim: “It’s a good time to be a farmer; we’re going to make sure of that. So, today, I’m announcing that I have directed Secretary Perdue to provide $16 billion in assistance to America’s farmers and ranchers. It all comes from China.” And: “And just so you understand: These tariffs are paid for largely by China. A lot of people like to say ‘by us.’ In fact, Larry Kudlow was quoted but they didn’t have the second part of his quote, which was a very good quote. China subsidizes a lot of businesses. And China came out, and, in subsidizing the business, they pay for a big portion of that tax.” And: “China didn’t give us anything. Now they’re giving us billions.”

In fact: There is no evidence that China is paying for “a big portion” of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, let alone “all” of it. U.S. importers, not China, make the payments, though some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost. As the Washington Post noted, two academic studies have concluded that Americans are paying almost the entire cost; the study Trump has occasionally cited, which concluded that China would effectively pay more than 80 per cent, was a modelling exercise that used old data to estimate what would happen in this case.

The claim: “...and we opened up the beef exports with Japan. Did you know that? Right? That’s a big deal. So we opened it up with Japan. First time ever. So, beef is now going to be starting to flow to Japan. And our folks that do beef, they are very much happy. They were shocked to see that one, but it’s happening. It’s happening fast.”

In fact: “First time ever” is an exaggeration. Trump’s Department of Agriculture said on its website: “The new terms, which take effect immediately, allow U.S. products from all cattle, regardless of age, to enter Japan for the first time since 2003.”

The claim: “And one of the regulations we did, Waters of the United States rule — it sounds beautiful, but once you open the document, it’s a total catastrophe. And you know that better than anybody. I got rid of it. I terminated it. It’s got a beautiful title. Everything inside is a disaster for our farmers and, actually, for our country.”

In fact: Trump has not terminated this rule. It has been blocked by the courts in 28 states, but it remains in effect in 22 states. Trump’s administration proposed a new version of the rule in December 2018, but it had not yet taken effect at the time he spoke.

The claim: “Billions of dollars is already flowing into our treasury that we never saw before. We never saw 10 cents from China. China didn’t give us anything. Now they’re giving us billions. And some of that money is going to go to the farmers to help them out during a period where trade has been very unfair to them.” And: “I don’t know how China can do this. Because I’ll be honest: We’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars brought into our country. We’ve never gotten 10 cents. We’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars coming into our country.”

In fact: It is not even close to true that the U.S. never had even “10 cents” of tariff revenue coming into its treasury from tariffs on China before Trump’s tariffs; FactCheck.org noted that tariffs on China have generated at least $8 billion ever year since 2009. The U.S. had numerous tariffs on China under previous presidents, and Obama imposed high-profile tariffs on Chinese tires, solar panels and steel. (As always: U.S. importers pay these tariffs, not China itself.)

The claim: “But the Democrat House is not. Pelosi does not understand the bill. She doesn’t understand it. Even though unions are in favour of it, farmers, manufac- — everybody, just about, is in favour of it.”

In fact: It is not true that unions are in favour of Trump’s revised NAFTA, as the New York Times explained in detail: “The A.F.L.-C.I.O., which represents more than 12 million workers, urged its members in April to write to Congress opposing the deal in its current form. The United Automobile Workers union, after meeting with Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, in March, said in a statement that ‘some progress has been made’ but ‘more work needs to be done to make this agreement enforceable and meaningful to our members and their job security.’ The president of the United Steelworkers union told the CBC this week that ‘we’re not going to be out supporting a trade deal’ until it includes labor law overhaul and enforcement mechanisms. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, a representative for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said that without additional changes, ‘we will be forced to oppose the revised agreement.’ When the framework of the new agreement was first reached in October, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America criticized the deal, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to take a position.”

The claim: “The Democrats have done nothing in the House. They’ve done absolutely nothing. They don’t get — I mean, other than investigate. They want to, ‘Let’s investigate.’ After the Mueller report came out — no collusion, no obstruction, no nothing — ‘Let’s start it all over again.’ They weren’t too happy, so they want to just keep it going.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “But I will say this: She (Nancy Pelosi) said I walked into the room, right next door, yesterday, and walked in and started screaming and yelling. Just the opposite. Just the opposite. Because I know that they will always say that, even if it didn’t happen — because this happened once before. I walked out; I was so calm. You all saw me minutes later. I was at a news conference. I was extremely calm. I was probably even more so in that room.”

In fact: In a letter to Democratic colleagues, Pelosi said that Trump had a “temper tantrum” at the brief White House meeting that was supposed to be about infrastructure. But she did not say he “walked in and started screaming and yelling,” nor did she specifically accuse him of screaming and yelling at all. She wrote, “He threatened to stop working with Democrats on all legislation unless we end oversight of his Administration and he had a temper tantrum for us all to see.”

The claim: “These are bad people. You know, a lot of people say ‘deep state.’ I don’t say ‘deep state.’ We have a lot of bad people and I think they’re being found out.”

In fact: Trump has used the phrase “deep state” on multiple occasions. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity a month prior to this remark, he said, “We have far more support than people understand. If we didn’t, I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now. I mean, it would be a total mess. We had enough to fight the deep state.” A week after this remark, he tweeted, “.@SeanHannity is having a DEEP STATE SHOW tonight on Fox News at 9:00 PM (E), exposing the tremendous abuse of power that has been uncovered.” In September 2018, he tweeted, “The Deep State and the Left, and their vehicle, the Fake News Media, are going Crazy — & they don’t know what to do.”

The claim: “So I’ve been under investigation — a phony investigation based on no facts, based on an overthrow of the president.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate “an overthrow of the president” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: “The wall is being built. We just left the Army Corps of Engineers. We have — we will soon have hundreds of miles under construction and we’ll have way over 400 miles completed by the end of next year.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

The claim: “I don’t know how China can do this. Because I’ll be honest: We’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars brought into our country. We’ve never gotten 10 cents. We’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars coming into our country.”

In fact: Tariffs on China do not bring money into the U.S. While some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost, the U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they often pass on a substantial portion of the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The claim: “And now, as you saw in Ohio — great state, an unbelievable state — the only thing I had was General Motors closed Lordstown plant — this big Lordstown plant. And I called up Mary Barra and I said, ‘Mary, you either sell it or open it.’ She didn’t like the way I talked to her. I said, ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. You either sell that plant or open that plant.’ And she sold it to a very good company, I think, that will do a good job making electric trucks.”

In fact: GM had not yet sold the Lordstown plant. “GM is in discussions to sell the Lordstown complex to Workhorse. The deal is not done,” GM spokesperson Dan Flores told us.

Twitter

The claim: “Dems are furious at Robert Mueller for his findings — NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION. Now they should go back to work and legislate!”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Twitter

The claim: “Wow! CNN Ratings are WAY DOWN, record lows. People are getting tired of so many Fake Stories and Anti-Trump lies.”

In fact: CNN’s ratings were not at an all-time low, though they dropped 14 per cent in the previous month from the same month a year prior. The Hill reported that April 2019 was CNN’s lowest month for prime-time viewers since October 2015.

Twitter

The claim: “71% of Voters rate the Economy as Excellent or Good. The highest number in more than 18 years! @QuinnipiacPoll”

In fact: Qunnipiac told us that they only started asking this question in December 2001, less than 18 years prior, so Trump is off a little.

FRIDAY, MAY 24

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (8 false claims)

The claim: “So everything that they need is declassified, and they’ll be able to see how this hoax — how the hoax or witch hunt started and why it started. It was a — an attempted coup or an attempted takedown of the president of the United States.” And: “”And I’ll tell you what: This is all about what happened and when did it happen. Because this was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, and we have to find out.”

In fact: There is no evidence anyone was attempting to perpetrate a “coup” or a “takedown of the president” by investigating the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia or by their actions during the investigation.

The claim: “I’d like to talk about lowering drug prices, which I’ve done better than any president ever. We had a year — this year, as you know, drug prices went down, first time in 51 years.” And: “The one thing I’m very proud of also, on drug prices — I brought it down; first time in 51 years that drug prices went down.”

In fact: Prescription drug prices declined in 2018 for the first time in 46 years, according to the Consumer Price Index, not “51 years.” And as the Associated Press noted: “The index was updated this month, before Trump’s latest claims, and it showed an increase of 0.3% in April for prescription drug prices when compared with the same month last year.”

The claim: “Our country is doing unbelievably well. We have the best economy we’ve probably ever had. We have the best job numbers we’ve ever had. We have the best unemployment numbers we’ve ever had.”

In fact: The unemployment rate for April 2019 was 3.6 per cent. That was the best in more than 49 years, but not the best “in history”: the unemployment rate was 2.5 per cent in 1953. (Trump sometimes specifies that he is referring to the unemployment rates for particular minority groups, but he did not do so here.)

The claim: “What I don’t think is right is you do a redo. They were very un — they’re very unhappy with the Mueller report. No collusion, no obstruction. No nothing. They’re very unhappy.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “And just so you know, I was the most transparent — and am — transparent president in history. We gave 500 witnesses. I allowed attorneys to testify in front of Bob Mueller. Two thousand five hundred subpoenas. One million four hundred thousand pages of doc- — we gave it. I didn’t have to give any of it. We gave it.”

In fact: It is not true that Trump “gave” 500 witnesses to the special counsel. That is the approximate total number of witnesses Mueller’s team interviewed. Some of Trump’s aides were among the witnesses, but many other witnesses were not under his control in any way. The witness list included, for example, former FBI director James Comey and former acting attorney general Sally Yates, both of whom Trump fired.

The claim: “Right now, they don’t — I don’t think Iran wants to fight. And I certainly don’t think they want to fight with us. But they cannot have nuclear weapons. And under the Obama horrible agreement, they would’ve had nuclear weapons within five or six years. They can’t have nuclear weapons, and they understand that.”

In fact: “This is totally false,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project International Crisis Group. “As of 2023, some of the limits of the nuclear deal will start to fade away, but the most important limit (on the volume of low enriched uranium that Iran can store) will remain in place until 2030, obstructing any Iranian dash toward nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Iran now had one of the most thoroughly monitored nuclear fuel cycles in the world, allowing the UN’s nuclear watchdog to quickly detect any weatherization effect and ring alarm bells. Another important point is that even once the JCPOA’s limits sunset, Iran would have been bound by the NPT’s limits and inspection mechanisms. By pushing the Iranians to start rolling back some of the restraints on their program under the nuclear deal, Trump is in fact bringing the clock forward for the Iranians.” The Associated Press said of a similar Trump claim: “Iran would not have access to nuclear weapons capability in a ‘very short period’ without violating the terms of the 2015 accord...During the 15-year life of most provisions of the deal, Iran’s capabilities were limited to a level where it could not produce a nuclear bomb. Iran was thought to be only months away from a bomb when the deal came into effect.”

The claim: “I won an election. I won it easily — 306 to 223. I won it pretty easily.”

In fact: Hillary Clinton earned 232 electoral votes, not 223. This was not a one-time slip: it was the 25th time Trump said “223” as president.

The claim: “My poll numbers are very good. You don’t like to report them, but my polls — I guess we have a 48 today. We have a 51. We have very good poll numbers, considering. Now, I have to tell you, if you people would give straight news, I’d be at 70. I’d be maybe at 75. But you don’t give straight news; you give fake news.”

In fact: We won’t fact-check Trump’s hypothetical about what would happen if the media coverage was more favourable to him. We could not find any poll that day, though, in which he had a “48” or “51” per cent approval rating. He was at 46 per cent in that day’s Rasmussen poll, which is generally his best, and 44 per cent or lower in the eight previous polls tracked by the RealClearPolitics poll listing.

Twitter

The claim: “I don’t know why the Radical Left Democrats want Bob Mueller to testify when he just issued a 40 Million Dollar Report that states, loud & clear & for all to hear, No Collusion and No Obstruction (how do you Obstruct a NO crime?) Dems are just looking for trouble and a Do-Over!”

In fact: Trump’s “$40 million” figure may well be inflated, but we don’t yet know for sure. What we do know: special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

SATURDAY, MAY 25

Remarks to Japanese business leaders (8 false claims)

The claim: “Just last week, U.S. beef exports gained full access to Japan and to the markets in Japan for the first time since the year 2000.”

In fact: It was the first time since the year 2003, as Trump’s Department of Agriculture said on its website: “The new terms, which take effect immediately, allow U.S. products from all cattle, regardless of age, to enter Japan for the first time since 2003.”

The claim: “There’s no better place to invest. You look at what’s happened with our stock market. It’s up almost 50 per cent since my election in 2016.”

In fact: As of the day Trump spoke, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 40 per cent from the day of the election in 2016. The S&P 500 Index was up 32 per cent.

The claim: “We have the best employment numbers we’ve ever had, as of this week...With women, we have the best numbers we’ve had in now 71 years. That’s going to be, very soon, a historic number, meaning the best ever.”

In fact: The April 2019 unemployment rate for women was 3.4 per cent, lowest since September 1953 — between 65 and 66 years prior, not “71 years.”

The claim: “Manufacturing and small business optimism have set all-time records, and consumer confidence has just surged to a 21-year high.”

In fact: The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index had just registered a preliminary 15-year high in May, its highest reading since 2004 but not a 21-year high. (Also, the final data for the month, released after Trump spoke, was lower, just an eight-month high.)

The claim: “We slashed our corporate tax rate from the highest in the developed world to one of the lowest in the developed world. We took it down — I mean, some people could say we’re at 41, 42 per cent — different places, different areas. But we took it down from probably, on average, 41, 42 per cent — depending on what state you’re talking about; sometimes much higher than that — to 21 per cent.”

In fact: Trump was off on three points. The U.S. average combined statutory corporate tax rate was indeed highest among developed countries before Trump’s tax cut, but it was 38.9 per cent, according to the Tax Foundation, not 41 or 42 per cent. After Trump’s tax cut, the combined rate was 25.7 per cent. (The federal rate alone was 21 per cent, but that is not a valid comparison to the pre-cut “41, 42 per cent” rate Trump was citing, which included state rates.) The cut took the U.S. to just above the average for the OECD, not “one of the lowest in the developed world.”

The claim: “The United States, as you know, has become the number one country in the world, during my administration — two and a half years — in energy. So we’re now number one in the world.”

In fact: The U.S. Energy Information Administration said in 2017 that 2016 was the fifth straight year the U.S. had been the “world’s top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons.” It was crude oil in particular in which the U.S. recently became number-one in the world, according to the EIA, which made the estimate in September 2018.

The claim: “Many, many, pipelines got approved that were stuck. They were absolutely stuck. You know the Keystone XL Pipeline — the big one — I did that in my first week in office. Forty-eight thousand jobs. And that’s now under construction.”

In fact: The number of jobs Keystone XL might create is hotly debated; we won’t call Trump’s prediction false. We’ll also let him get away with saying he “did that” in his first week in office, though the order he issued in his first week was not a final approval for the project. What is objectively false is his claim that “that’s now under construction.” TransCanada announced earlier the same month that construction would not start in 2019 because of court decisions continuing to block the project.

The claim: “And we really have made it much easier. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the red tape. As an example, if you look at the various types of plants, nobody was getting them approved. Nobody was getting them out of the EPA. You couldn’t get refineries done. You couldn’t get anything.”

In fact: This is an obvious exaggeration. While Trump has indeed loosened various business regulations, it isn’t true that “nobody” could get “the various types of plants” approved by the Environmental Protection Agency before he took office.

Twitter

The claim: “Democrat Senator Mark Warner is acting and talking like he is in total control of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Their is nothing bipartisan about him. He should not be allowed to take ‘command’ of that Committee. Too important! Remember when he spoke to the Russian jokester?”

In fact: We could find no evidence of Warner speaking to a “Russian jokester.” Another Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, once took a call from Russian pranksters.

Twitter

The claim: “Another activist Obama appointed judge has just ruled against us on a section of the Southern Wall that is already under construction. This is a ruling against Border Security and in favour of crime, drugs and human trafficking. We are asking for an expedited appeal!”

In fact: As noted by Dror Ladin, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer working on this case, the relevant sections of border wall were not already under construction. “Currently, both enjoined wall sections consist only of stretches of land with vehicle barriers that have existed there for years,” Ladin said in an email. “Construction had not yet begun at the time the court ordered a stop to it.” He noted that the government said the following in one of its court filings about one of the sections: “Absent the injunction from this Court, construction on the Yuma Sector 1 project would begin this week.”

MONDAY, MAY 27

Joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (8 false claims)

The claim: “And I think that he (Kim Jong Un) is looking to develop that way. He knows that, with nuclear, that’s never going to happen. Only bad can happen. He understands that. He is a very smart man. He gets it well. So I think that he is — he is going to try, at some point. I’m in no rush at all. The sanctions remain. We have our hostages back. We, as you know, are getting the remains — continuing to get the remains. A lot of good things are happening.”

In fact: The U.S. was not “continuing to get the remains” at the time: the Pentagon had announced three weeks prior that the U.S. had suspended its joint effort with North Korea to recover and return the remains of U.S. soldiers who died on North Korean territory, since, according to the Pentagon, North Korea had ceased communicating with the U.S. about the effort since the failed summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam three months prior. “As a result, our effort to communicate with the Korean People’s Army regarding the possible resumption of joint recovery operation for 2019 has been suspended,” the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency said, according the Associated Press. “We have reached the point where we can no longer effectively plan, coordinate, and conduct field operations in the DPRK during this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2019.”

The claim: “And, very importantly, there’s been no nuclear testing for two years. I looked at a chart the other day. During the past administration, there were many numbers that were very high, like 10 and 12 and 18, having to do with missile launches and nuclear testing. And for the last two years, on the bottom, it had zero and zero.”

In fact: North Korea’s last nuclear test was on September 3, 2017, well under two years prior when Trump made this comment in May 2019. North Korea had also conducted more than 15 missile tests over the previous two years — including one, of short-range missiles, earlier in this same month Trump spoke. Trump’s own senior officials, including acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, confirmed that this was a missile test. “Let me just be clear: these were short-range missiles,” Shanahan told reporters, CNN reported.

The claim: “The Mueller report came out: no obstruction, no collusion. No nothing. It’s a beautiful report. The Democrats cannot understand what happened.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction.” In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) The key sentence was this: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment.” (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “They really thought they had some people on their side, because, as you know, the people doing the investigation were 18 extremely angry Democrats, many of whom worked for Hillary Clinton and supported Hillary Clinton.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was, of course, led by a Republican: Mueller himself. We allow Trump to characterize the lawyers working for Mueller as “angry Democrats,” but it is not true that “many” of them “worked for Hillary Clinton.” While PolitiFact found that six lawyers on Mueller’s team had made donations to Clinton, either in 2016 or in the past, only one, Jeannie Rhee, could plausibly be said to have “worked for Hillary Clinton” even indirectly: Rhee represented the Clinton Foundation, as an outside counsel, in its defence against a 2015 lawsuit.

The claim: “We have a USMCA. We have a deal with Canada and Mexico that everybody wants, I think. It’s all done. And I think they probably want to be doing that. As you know, Ambassador Lighthizer is here, right now. That’s a deal that’s gotten universal praise. Unions love it. Farmers love it. Manufacturers love it.”

In fact: It is not true that unions love Trump’s revised NAFTA, as the New York Times explained in detail: “The A.F.L.-C.I.O., which represents more than 12 million workers, urged its members in April to write to Congress opposing the deal in its current form. The United Automobile Workers union, after meeting with Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, in March, said in a statement that ‘some progress has been made’ but ‘more work needs to be done to make this agreement enforceable and meaningful to our members and their job security.’ The president of the United Steelworkers union told the CBC this week that ‘we’re not going to be out supporting a trade deal’ until it includes labor law overhaul and enforcement mechanisms. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, a representative for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers said that without additional changes, ‘we will be forced to oppose the revised agreement.’ When the framework of the new agreement was first reached in October, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America criticized the deal, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined to take a position.”

The claim: “Many companies are leaving China right now because of the tariffs. China is subsidizing a lot of industry because — you know, foolishly, some people said that the American taxpayer is paying the tariffs of China. No, no, no — it’s not that way. They’re paying a small percentage, but our country is taking in billions and billions of dollars. Our farmers — out of all of that money, the tens of billions of dollars — we’re giving a relatively small percentage to our farmers, who have really been a focal point of what’s gone on with trade.” And: “I believe that we will have a very good deal with China sometime into the future, because I don’t believe that China can continue to pay these, really, hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs.”

In fact: There is no evidence that Americans are paying for merely a “small percentage” of the federal revenue from Trump’s tariffs on China. U.S. importers, not China, make the payments, though some Chinese manufacturers eat a portion of the cost. As the Washington Post noted, two academic studies have concluded that Americans are paying almost the entire cost; the study Trump has occasionally cited, which concluded that China would effectively pay more than 80 per cent, was a modelling exercise that used old data to estimate what would happen in this case.

The claim: Question: “And, Mr. President, a follow-up on North Korea. You tweeted about North Korea yesterday. Do you believe that they violated U.N. resolutions with the short-range missile launch? And does it give you pause at all to be appearing to side with a brutal dictator instead of with a fellow American — the former Vice President Joe Biden?” Trump: “Well, Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual. He probably is, based on his record. I think I agree with him on that. But, at the same time, my people think it could have been a violation, as you know. I view it differently. I view it as a man — perhaps he wants to get attention, and perhaps not. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. All I know is that there have been no nuclear tests. There have been no ballistic missiles going out. There have been no long-range missiles going out. And I think that someday we’ll have a deal. I’m not in a rush. Tremendous sanctions being put on the country of North Korea.”

In fact: Trump was incorrect that “there have been no ballistic missiles going out”: this very test was a ballistic missile test, as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said a bit later at the same press conference. “On the 9th of May, North Korea launched a short-range ballistic missile. This is violating the Security Council resolution,” Abe said. Trump’s own senior officials later confirmed that it was a missile test. “Let me just be clear: these were short-range missiles,” Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told reporters, CNN reported. “The UN Security Council resolution prohibits the launch of any ballistic missiles and there is no doubt that North Korea has violated the resolution,” said National Security Advisor John Bolton.

The claim: “Look what has happened to Iran. Iran, when I first came into office, was a terror. They were fighting in many locations all over the Middle East. They were behind every single major attack, whether it was Syria, whether it was Yemen, whether it was individual smaller areas, whether it was taking away oil from people. They were involved with everything. Now they’re pulling back because they’re got serious economic problems. We have massive — as you know, massive sanctions and other things.”

In fact: Iran was obviously not “behind every single major attack” in the Middle East before Trump came into office. For example, Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project International Crisis Group, noted, “ Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with U.S., support invaded Yemen and prompted a humanitarian crisis there, further pushing the Houthis in the arms of Iran. Iran had no role in Libya, yet the US and its NATO allies changed the Libyan regime and then Gulf countries and Turkey turned the country into a theater for proxy conflict.” Also, Vaez said, “I really don’t know what he means by taking their oil. Iran has not taken over any countries’ oil resources.” He added, “There is no evidence of Iranian retrenchment in the region in the aftermath of re-imposition of U.S. sanctions. U.S. maximum pressure strategy has created a situation in which Iran has increasingly less to lose, and is thus becoming more aggressive in the region. If the sanctions were designed to temper Iran’s behavior, they have clearly backfired.”

Twitter

The claim: “Impeach for what, having created perhaps the greatest Economy in our Country’s history, rebuilding our Military, taking care of our Vets (Choice)...”

In fact: The Veterans Choice health program was passed and created in 2014 under Obama. The law Trump signed in 2018 was the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.

TUESDAY, MAY 28

Speech to members of the military on USS Wasp in Japan

The claim: “We’re not looking for regime change. I just want to make that clear. We’re looking for no nuclear weapons. If you look at the (Iran) deal that Biden and President Obama signed, they would have access — free access — to nuclear weapons, where they wouldn’t even be in violation, in just a very short period of time.”

In fact: “This is totally false,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project International Crisis Group. “As of 2023, some of the limits of the nuclear deal will start to fade away, but the most important limit (on the volume of low enriched uranium that Iran can store) will remain in place until 2030, obstructing any Iranian dash toward nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Iran now had one of the most thoroughly monitored nuclear fuel cycles in the world, allowing the UN’s nuclear watchdog to quickly detect any weatherization effect and ring alarm bells. Another important point is that even once the JCPOA’s limits sunset, Iran would have been bound by the NPT’s limits and inspection mechanisms. By pushing the Iranians to start rolling back some of the restraints on their program under the nuclear deal, Trump is in fact bringing the clock forward for the Iranians.” The Associated Press said of Trump’s claim: “That’s a misrepresentation of what the deal required . Iran would not have access to nuclear weapons capability in a ‘very short period’ without violating the terms of the 2015 accord...During the 15-year life of most provisions of the deal, Iran’s capabilities were limited to a level where it could not produce a nuclear bomb. Iran was thought to be only months away from a bomb when the deal came into effect. After 15 years, Iran could have an array of advanced centrifuges ready to work, the limits on its stockpile would be gone and, in theory, it could then throw itself into producing highly enriched uranium. But nothing in the deal prevented the West from trying to rein Iran in again with sanctions. The deal included a pledge by Iran never to seek a nuclear weapon. In return, partners in the deal eased sanctions on Iran.”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 29

Twitter

The claim: “How do you impeach a Republican President for a crime that was committed by the Democrats? WITCH-HUNT!”

In fact: There is no evidence that “the Democrats” committed some major crime related to the investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.

THURSDAY, MAY 30

Twitter

The claim: “The Navy put out a disclaimer on the McCain story. Looks like the story was an exaggeration, or even Fake News — but why not, everything else is!”

In fact: The Wall Street Journal article was not “fake news”: the Navy eventually confirmed that the White House had made a request to move the USS John McCain ship out of Trump’s sight during his visit to Japan. “A request was made to the U.S. Navy to minimize the visibility of USS John S. McCain, however, all ships remained in their normal configuration during the President’s visit,” said Rear Admiral Charlie Brown, the Navy chief of information. While the Navy disputed some other details of the story, including that a barge was moved to block the name of the ship from Trump’s sight, the story certainly was not invented.

Exchange with reporters before Marine One departure (8 false claims)

The claim: Question: “What did you make of Mueller’s statement yesterday?” Trump: “Well, I think it was the same as the report. There wasn’t much change. It was, to me, the same as the report. And there’s no obstruction. You see what we’re saying. There’s no obstruction, there’s no collusion, there’s no nothing.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not make a finding of “no obstruction,” as he emphasized in the statement Trump was being asked about here. In fact, Mueller’s final report laid out an extensive case that Trump may have committed obstruction on several occasions, though it did not explicitly accuse him of doing so. (The report explained, as Mueller did in the statement, that Mueller was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him.) “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

The claim: “You know who got me elected? You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all. Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side. What you ought to ask is this: do you think the media helped Hillary Clinton get elected? She didn’t make it, but you take a look at collusion between Hillary Clinton and the media. You take a look at collusion between Hillary Clinton and Russia. She had more to do, in the campaign, with Russia than I did. I had nothing to do.”

In fact: There is no basis for the claim that Russia helped Clinton or that Clinton colluded with Russia.

The claim: “China would love to make a deal with us. We had a deal, and they broke the deal. I think, if they had to do again, they wouldn’t have done what they did. We’re taking in billions of dollars in tariffs. China is subsidizing products. So the United States taxpayer is paying for very little of it.”

In fact: U.S. importers, not China, pay Trump’s tariffs on products being imported by China. As the Washington Post explained, the report Trump has cited as evidence for his claim that China is paying does not actually prove what he says it does: “Trump is quoting from a study by European economists that predicted that a 25-percentage-point increase in tariffs raises U.S. consumer prices on all affected Chinese products by only 4.5 percent on average, while the producer price of Chinese firms declines by 20.5 percent. The study was released in November, using previously released studies from the 1990s, not actual data on prices. But a paper published March 2, by three prominent U.S. economists, found exactly the opposite had happened when actual trade data was studied. ‘Overall, using standard economic methods, we find that the full incidence of the tariff falls on domestic consumers, with a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month by the end of 2018,’ the economists reported. ‘We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers up to now, with no impact so far on the prices received by foreign exporters. We also find that U.S. producers responded to reduced import competition by raising their prices.’ Another paper, published March 3, found similar results, with the impact heaviest in Republican counties. ‘We estimate that the U.S. economy has lost $68.8 billion due to higher import prices,’ the economists concluded.”

The claim: “Well, I think I’ve been much tougher on elections than President Obama. President Obama was told, in 2016, just before the election in September, that Russia may try and interfere with the election. He did nothing. And the reason he did nothing is he thought Hillary was going to win.”

In fact: While Obama has been widely faulted, including by many Democrats, for not responding more aggressively when he was informed of the reported Russian interference in the 2016 election, “he did nothing” is inaccurate. In October 2016, a month before the election, the Obama administration issued an extraordinary statement attributing the election interference to “Russia’s senior-most officials.” According to a comprehensive Washington Post story, Obama and his officials also delivered a series of private warnings to Russia: CIA director John Brennan warned his Russian counterpart in August 2016; “a month later, Obama confronted Putin directly during a meeting of world leaders in Hangzhou, China”; national security adviser Susan Rice summoned the Russian ambassador to the White House in October “and handed him a message to relay to Putin”; “then, on Oct. 31, the administration delivered a final pre-election message via a secure channel to Moscow originally created to avert a nuclear exchange.” Obama reportedly also sought to get Republicans and Democrats to sign on to a joint statement denouncing the Russian interference; former Obama officials have alleged that Republican leaders refused to agree to participate.

The claim: “I disagree with John McCain on the way he handled the vets, because I said you got get to Choice. He was never able to get Choice. I got Choice.”

In fact: This was an especially egregious lie. As usual, Trump was wrong that he was the person who got the Veterans Choice health care program passed; in fact, it was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. (The law Trump signed in 2018, the VA MISSION Act, modified the Choice program.) This time, though, Trump went further, using his Choice non-accomplishment to suggest that he had done more for veterans than McCain — when, in reality, McCain, a Vietnam veteran himself, was the key Republican legislator behind the Choice bill in 2014. That bill was a compromise measure between McCain’s proposal and a proposal put forward by left-wing independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chaired the Veterans Affairs Committee. The law Trump signed to modify the program was named for McCain: it is the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act of 2018.

The claim: “But we are going to do something very dramatic on the border, because people are coming into our country — the Democrats will not give us laws. They will not change laws. They will not meet. They will not do anything. They want to have open borders. They want to have crime. They want to have drugs pouring into our country. They want to have human trafficking.”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

The claim: “Right now, when you catch somebody, you have to release them.”

In fact: This claim is overly broad. It is not true that all unauthorized immigrants caught entering the U.S. have to be released; they are subject to rapid deportation, known as expedited removal, without seeing a judge. If migrants declare that they are seeking asylum, they do have a right to a legal process, and many of them are released.

The claim: Question: “He (Robert Mueller) said he could not say there was no crime. He could not clear you.” Trump: “That means you’re innocent. That means you’re innocent.” Question: “He said he couldn’t say you were innocent.” Trump: “Excuse me — then he should’ve said ‘you’re guilty.’” Question: “But he said he couldn’t do that because that would be unfair.” Trump: “That’s wrong. That’s wrong. No. Because he said it — he said it differently the first time. So he said, essentially, ‘You’re innocent.’ I’m innocent of all charges.”

In fact: Special counsel Robert Mueller did not “say it differently the first time.” In his official report and in a subsequent statement to the media, Mueller emphasized that he could not clear Trump of obstruction of justice; he explained that he was abiding by a longstanding Department of Justice policy that holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted; the report said it would be unfair even to accuse the president of a crime without charging him. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. We are unable to reach such a judgment,” the report said. (The attorney general, William Barr, reviewed the report and decided that there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.)

Twitter

The claim: “The Greatest Presidential Harassment in history. After spending $40,000,000 over two dark years, with unlimited access, people, resources and cooperation, highly conflicted Robert Mueller would have brought charges, if he had ANYTHING, but there were no charges to bring!”

In fact: Mueller did not have “unlimited access.” Most notably, Trump himself refused to sit for an interview with Mueller’s team.

FRIDAY, MAY 31

Twitter

The claim: “Hard to believe that with the Crisis on the Border, the Dems won’t do the quick and easy fix. Would solve the problem but they want Open Borders, which equals crime!”

In fact: The Democrats do not support open borders. They have endorsed, and approved billions in funding for, various border security measures that are not Trump’s wall.

Twitter

The claim: “Sean Davis, The Federalist: ‘Mueller proved his entire operation was a political hit job. Still ZERO evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion, and no new evidence from Mueller.’ @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews”

In fact: We’re generous in fact-checking Trump when he quotes other people; if he gets the quote largely correct, we won’t call it false even if he has done a little bit of deleting or editing. This time, though, he went too far: the supposed quote was not a quote at all. Matthew Gertz of the liberal media-watchdog group Media Matters for America pointed out that Davis did not say these words on Tucker Carlson’s show, other than “no collusion.” Rather, Trump took the text from three of Fox News’s chyrons on the bottom third of the screen during Davis’s appearance and combined them into one “quote” he attributed to Davis. (An article written by Davis for The Federalist did include the first part of the “quote”: “Mueller Just Proved His Entire Operation Was A Political Hit Job That Trampled The Rule Of Law.”)

Twitter

The claim: “We have a 100 Billion Dollar Trade Deficit with Mexico. It’s time!”

In fact: The U.S. has never had a $100 billion trade deficit with Mexico. According to U.S. government data, the deficit was $78 billion in 2018, $69 billion in 2017.

SUNDAY, JUNE 2

Twitter

The claim: “The Wall is under construction and moving along quickly, despite all of the Radical Liberal Democrat lawsuits.”

In fact: No new wall was under construction at the time, though one stretch, in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, was close to starting construction. What Trump showed the media in Calexico, California earlier in the year was a replacement fence, a steel-bollard barrier that improved upon the previous barrier made out of metal scraps and Vietnam-era airplane landing mats. While the bollard fence is indeed new, we and others have always used “new wall” to describe Trump’s proposals for concrete border barriers in places where there have not previously been barriers. Trump recently began making a case for why he believes replacement fencing should also be considered new wall rather than simply asserting that it was new wall, but we still disagree. (Trump deserves some flexibility on the matter of what material was used, we say, but not on the question of whether there were pre-existing barriers.)

Twitter

The claim: “I never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty.’ Made up by the Fake News Media, and they got caught cold! Will @CNN, @nytimes and others apologize? Doubt it!”

In fact: The media didn’t make this up. Trump indeed used the word “nasty” to refer to Markle. In an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Sun, his interviewer told him that Markle “wasn’t so nice about you during the campaign,” explaining that Markle said she would move to Canada if he got elected. He said, “A lot of people are moving here. So what can I say? No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.” Trump can fairly argue that he was merely calling that one Markle comment “nasty,” not Markle herself “nasty,” but the story was not “made up” by the media.

Twitter

The claim: “Democrats can’t impeach a Republican President for crimes committed by Democrats.”

In fact: There is no evidence that major Russia-related crimes were committed by “the Democrats.”

Daniel Dale is the Star's Washington bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @ddale8